55 pages • 1 hour read
Robert DarntonThe Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History
Nonfiction | Essay Collection | Adult | Published in 1984A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapter 2Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 2 Summary: “Workers Revolt: The Great Cat Massacre of the Rue Saint-Séverin”
In the late 1730s a group of apprentices and journeymen at a Paris printing shop spent the better part of a day slaughtering scores of cats, indiscriminately and with abandon. While such a gruesome display would strike most modern observers as a horrific outrage, those who participated in the massacre and many who witnessed it found the whole scene deeply hilarious. Given Darnton’s dictum that the best way to understand a culture is to probe the incomprehensible, the great cat massacre offers a perfect example for the author to unpack.
The story is sourced from the memoir of Nicholas Contat, a printer’s apprentice at a shop located on Rue Saint-Séverin in Paris and one of the key instigators of the massacre. Given that printers were among the only members of the lower artisan class required to be literate, it is rare for such a tale of working-class mischief to exist at all, Darnton writes. The account is written using aliases, with “Jerome” standing in for Contat and “Léveillé” standing in for his best friend.
To hear Contat tell it, life for many apprentices was as full of hardship as the lives of peasants. After struggling to sleep in a foul and freezing room amid the incessant howls of alley cats, Jerome and Léveillé woke up each day before dawn to run errands and endure abuse from their master, Jacques Vincent. While they were supposed to be fed leftovers from the journeymen’s meals, the chef sold this food and fed the apprentices cat food that was so spoiled even the alley cats refused to touch it. By contrast, Jacques Vincent—and, in particular, his wife—adored cats as pets and were known to feed them roast fowl. The wife’s favorite was a gray cat she called la grise.
One night, during which the nearby alley cats were particularly loud and orgiastic in their howling, Léveillé got the notion of climbing the rooftop adjacent to Vincent’s domicile and mimicking the howling of a cat near his bedroom window. The next morning the deeply pious Jacques Vincent—believing himself to be bewitched—ordered Jerome and Léveillé to get rid of the alley cats in the immediate vicinity of his home.
Armed with iron bars and broom handles, Jerome and Léveillé proceeded to bludgeon every cat in sight, including la grise. Their coworkers joined in on the slaughter, which culminated in a mock court proceeding in which the dead cats were strung up and put on trial for their “crimes.” When confronted with the gruesome pantomime, the master’s wife was horrified. She scanned the area for signs of la grise, but Jerome and Léveillé had the good sense to toss her favorite cat’s corpse into the sewer rather than display it as part of their mock trial. The master, meanwhile, was more angry at the loss of productivity than the massacre itself. For days after, the apprentices and journeymen entertained themselves with reenactments of the carnage.
Even given the extenuating circumstances around the event, it is still difficult for modern readers to ascertain why the massacre strikes these men as so uproariously funny. In an effort to get the joke, so to speak, Darnton peels back the gag’s many layers and arrives at some essential conclusions about the lower artisan class of Paris in the 1730s. On the surface, the massacre is a kind of personal revenge against Jacques Vincent and his wife. That revenge reflects deeper fissures within the artisan class. For example, while masters once lived with their apprentices and groomed them to become masters themselves someday, the master-employee relationship by the 1730s was far more impersonal. Moreover, the avenues for social advancement among apprentices and journeymen were inhibited by a severe contraction of the number of masters in Paris, as big printing houses put smaller ones out of business.
To view the massacre solely through the lens of 18th-century labor relations, however, is to ignore the symbolic importance of the cats themselves—to both the printers responsible for the slaughter and to French citizens more generally. Unlike today, when such acts are generally reserved for sadists and sociopaths, maiming and killing cats in the Old Regime was a startlingly common practice. Though centuries removed from the era of witch trials, 18th-century France was still rife with superstition. The pious and impious alike believed that maiming a cat was a strong deterrent in terms of protecting their homes from witchcraft. Some French carpenters even enclosed live cats in the walls of homes during the construction phase to bring about good luck.
Moreover, cat sacrifice took a center role in many French Catholic rituals, including the cycle of Saint John the Baptist, during which revelers threw bags filled with live cats into a bonfire. Cats also figured into various examples of charivari, the practice of publicly humiliating an individual that Frenchmen often engaged in during the revelries that preceded Lent. One charivari in particular involved tearing the fur off a cat to make it howl outside the window of a cuckold. Given that the master’s wife was said to be having an affair with a local priest, this ritual may have been on the minds of Jerome and the other cat-bashers, according to Darnton. Finally, cats figure more broadly in a wide range of French idioms surrounding sex.
From this perspective, the “joke” is so funny to the printers because it works on multiple levels. All at once, the massacre is a labor revolt, a sexually charged attack on the master’s dignity and the wife’s honor, and a light mockery of Catholic rituals, of which the printers were particularly aware, given the highly ritualistic nature of their own apprentice initiation ceremonies. Finally, the joke is risky—a key quality for any good joke.
In closing, Darnton includes an excerpt from Contat’s memoir in which the account of the great cat massacre is found.
Chapter 2 Analysis
By far the strongest representation of the author’s methodology is his examination of the great cat massacre. The massacre is a bafflingly opaque occurrence, much like the ones his anthropologist colleagues coalesce around in their investigations of ancient cultures. Even more confounding is the attitude taken toward the slaughter by its participants, who considered it “the funniest thing that ever happened” (75). Thus, Darnton takes a deep analytical dive into the incident in an attempt to “get the joke” (77). Ultimately, he emerges with a greater understanding of artisan culture in 18th-century France.
The memoir of Nicholas Contat is an extraordinarily unique text for Darnton. A big reason why so little is known about the attitudes of artisan and peasant classes is that, generally speaking, these individuals do not write, let alone read. Therefore, the bulk of what historians know about the world prior to the era of public schooling in the 19th century is filtered through the experiences of the middle and upper classes. The exception to this rule is the printer’s apprentice who must be literate to do his job. While few of them published memoirs like Contat, they wrote letters and therefore offer a rare firsthand glimpse of life among the underclass in the 18th century.
Of all Darnton’s takeaways from the massacre, the strongest is the notion that artisans—or, at the very least, this particular set of artisans—possessed a command of symbolism one might expect from a poet, and a very good poet at that. He writes, “The workers pushed their symbolic horseplay to the brink of reification, the point at which the killing of cats would turn into an open rebellion” (101). This plays into another broader theme for the author: the fluidity and intermingling of qualities across different classes. Just as the wealthy learned peasant tales from servants and wet nurses, the working-class apprentices of Rue Saint- Séverin were poets, albeit ones whose medium was bashing cats rather than flowery verse.
One cannot help but read Darnton’s characterization of the massacre as “an open rebellion” (101) without thinking, again, of the French Revolution, which inevitably colors every incident and datum described in the book. The author addresses this connection by writing, “It would be absurd to view the cat massacre as a dress rehearsal for the September massacres of the French Revolution” (98). At the same time, he grants that the massacre “did suggest a popular rebellion, though it remained restricted to the level of symbolism” (98). Unlike the peasants of the countryside, artisans and other urban laborers played a central role during the French Revolution. Although it was the upper classes who instigated and negotiated the political changes that swept France after 1789, it was the artisans and other so-called sans-culottes who led the assault on the Bastille on July 14, 1789. Like the cat massacre, the storming of the Bastille is a deeply symbolic act: Few prisoners remained in its walls at the time, and therefore the occupation of such a relatively insignificant administrative building was of little concrete strategic value. Rather, as Jacobin magazine puts it, it was the moment when “oppressed Parisians thrust themselves into the process of reform already underway [...] In this way, they helped transform what could have been a period of cautious reform into a period of genuine revolution.” (Walters, Jonah. “A Guide to the French Revolution.” Jacobin. 14 Jul. 2015.) Then, as with the cat massacre, the lower artisan class’s talent for symbolism is put to great effect.
As for the symbolism itself, the author devotes much of the essay to the wide and varied symbolic resonance of cats. In cats, Darnton identifies “an occult power associated with the taboo” (89) attributable to the ways cats straddle the line between animal and human. Cats’ eyes suggest a probing intelligence. Their howls can also sound like a woman’s scream. Witches transform into cats and vice versa. Finally, there is the frequency of feline imagery in all manner of sexual idioms, from “cat in heat” to various bawdy synonyms across multiple languages for female genitalia. If the rural peasantry feels little need to shroud its taboos in symbolism across varied folktales, the urban artisan does not have that luxury—and their symbol of choice, in many cases, is the cat.
As intellectually stimulating as the author’s discussion of the great cat massacre is, it begs two questions. The first is, did this event really happen? There appear to be no secondary independent accounts of the massacre, and everything Darnton knows about it comes from Contat’s account. One can at least allow for the fact that elements of Contat’s story are likely to have been embellished. Yet based on Darnton’s broader methodology, one can assume that the ultimate veracity of the story is of little concern to him. His is a book about attitudes, not events. Therefore, the fact that Contat includes the story—apocryphal or not—in his memoir and relates it with such excitement and zest speaks volumes about the artisan’s attitudes and how he expresses them.
The second question is trickier: Does the cat massacre really hold as much symbolic relevance as Darnton attributes to it? From one perspective, the answer is, again, that it doesn’t matter. It is a story, true or not, and Darnton is free to interpret it any way he likes within the context of Parisian artisan culture in the 1730s. That said, some of the conclusions Darnton pulls out of Contat’s text are more supportable than others. Without a doubt, Contat’s text is charged with sexual imagery and references to witchcraft. Yet one can reasonably wonder if the use of these idioms is enough to justify Darnton’s contention that the cat massacre is at once a charivari branding the master a cuckold and a mock religious ritual accusing the mistress of being a witch. This speaks to another of Darnton’s themes: the extraordinary difficulty with which modern readers and historians aim to divine the thought patterns of people who lived centuries in the past.
