The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History

An apprentice at Jacques Vincent’s printing shop on Rue Saint-Séverin, Nicholas Contat was one of the key instigators of the great cat massacre. Fed spoiled cat foot and forced to sleep in a filthy room surrounded by the incessant caterwauling of stray cats, Contat and his friend Léveillé enacted revenge on Jacques Vincent and his wife by bashing the wife’s favorite cat, along with numerous other felines in the surrounding area. The account of the massacre is found in a memoir written by Contat, a rare document in that the vast majority of the artisan class in 18th-century France was illiterate.

Through Contat’s account, Darnton explores the attitudes of a small group of printers’ apprentices and journeymen. While it is impossible to say whether these attitudes are representative of the artisan class as a whole or even just printing artisans more specifically, the author’s analysis shows that at least some of them possessed a keen understanding of symbolism rivaling that of many poets—and of ritualism rivaling that of many priests. Moreover, the account reflects these artisans’ attitudes toward their master, whom they considered a tyrant and a bourgeois despite others’ contention that even wealthy artisans did not belong to the bourgeoisie. Thus, this shows the surprising fluidity of France’s supposedly rigid class structure in the 18th century and reflects the extent to which these distinctions were subject to the perceptions of individuals living within that structure.

Contat is the perfect test subject for the author’s methodology of probing incomprehensible events for meaning. While his indiscriminate slaughter of local cats understandably strikes modern readers as an act of sadistic barbarism, a close reading of his memoir and an understanding of 18th-century customs allows one to view the massacre as both a symbolic labor revolt and a sexually charged joke on the master and mistress.

As the author of the 1768 Description of Montpellièr, the anonymous bourgeois is used by Darnton as an opening into the thoughts and behaviors of the French bourgeoisie. While the term “bourgeoisie” is fraught with multiple interpretations that persist to this day, Darnton seeks to define the label through the eyes of one of its members. Contrary to Marxist theory, the anonymous bourgeois and his ilk were not captains of industry—in fact, he was dismissive of the factory’s potential to revolutionize society. Rather, the anonymous bourgeois spends much of the book defining his socioeconomic class by its eating, sleeping, and grooming habits. He also defines the bourgeoisie in negative terms by explaining how it differs from both the underclass and the nobility. Despite France’s three-tiered social structure that placed both the underclass and the bourgeoisie in the Third Estate, the anonymous bourgeois distances himself from even the wealthiest artisans, for whom it is inappropriate to use the same silver table settings as members of the bourgeoisie like himself.

These observations may reflect the motives of at least some members of the bourgeoisie who rebelled against the First and Second Estates during the French Revolution. Given the anonymous bourgeois’s antipathy toward the underclass and his eagerness to protect the bourgeoisie from being infected by its ranks, the French Revolution takes on a far different cast than the one depicted by Marxists. Far from a social revolution on behalf of the underclass, the French Revolution exists in more of a political framework under this interpretation, as the bourgeois sought the political power they felt they deserve given their wealth.

A police inspector assigned to surveil writers and intellectuals in Paris, Joseph d’Hémery created a dossier of over 500 reports on some of the most important Enlightenment thinkers, including Denis Diderot, Jean Jacques-Rousseau, and Voltaire. While some reports are written in a dry, bureaucrat voice, many reflect an advanced sense of literary taste on the part of d’Hémery. D’Hémery was not shy about expressing his deep piety in his reports or commenting when a subject’s writing offends his religious sensibilities. At the same time, he was fully capable of praising an author’s talents even when he found their ideology dangerous.

Above all, d’Hémery valued cleverness in a writer, a reflection of a similar attitudinal trend Darnton identifies in his essay on French folklore. While the term “Enlightenment” does not appear in d’Hémery’s dossier, it is clear to Darnton that the inspector was implicitly aware of the movement and cognizant of the threat it posed to the union of church and state, which the inspector held in high regard.

Born in 1712 in Geneva, Jean-Jacques Rousseau was one of the most important philosophers of the 18th century. Particularly influential were his Discourse on Inequality and The Social Contract treatises, both of which were held in extraordinarily high regard by the Jacobin revolutionaries of the French Revolution. Because he lived in Paris in the middle of the 18th century and contributed to Diderot’s Encyclopédie, he is often grouped with the philosophers of the Enlightenment period. Rousseau’s own view of his status within the brotherhood of philosophers was much more complicated. As men like Diderot and d’Alembert made philosophy fashionable, Rousseau distanced himself from that social circle and the field of philosophy altogether.

As a case study of 18th-century reading habits, Darnton highlights Rousseau’s 1761 novel La Nouvelle Héloïse. The novel’s ability to speak directly to individuals across the socioeconomic spectrum, along with the fervent response with which it was met by fans, is evidence to Darnton that Rousseau provides a crucial bridge between the Age of Enlightenment and the Romantic Era.