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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 3Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 3 Summary: “A Bourgeois Puts His World in Order: The City as a Text”
Darnton continues to work up the French class system, from peasant to artisan and now to bourgeois. Before moving forward, the author must grapple with the term “bourgeois” itself, which he argues is aggravatingly imprecise yet unavoidable in any discussion of 18th-century France.
During France’s Old Regime era, society was stratified into three classes known as Estates. The First Estate was made up of the entire clergy, while the Second Estate was comprised of nobility and royalty, notwithstanding the king, who stood alone above all. These first two groups were imbued with a significant about of political power and were subject to different tax laws than the rest of the realm. The remaining 90% of France’s population belonged to the Third Estate. Within the Third Estate, the top socioeconomic group was the bourgeoisie. A bourgeois was often a wealthy merchant or a professional like a lawyer or doctor, and he almost always lived in a city. Most commonly, Darnton states, a bourgeois was a rentier, a landowner who lived off rent payments and did little work. In fact, Darnton rejects Karl Marx’s characterization of the bourgeoisie as a dynamic class of manufacturers. While manufacturers belonged to this class, Darnton suggests they made up a small fraction of it.
In keeping with his tendency to profile relatively ordinary individuals, Darnton’s guide to the bourgeoisie is the anonymous author of an obscure 1768 manuscript titled Etat et description de la ville de Montpellièr, or The State and Description of the City of Montpellièr. Over the course of 426 pages, the anonymous bourgeois exhaustively lists virtually every knowable piece of information about the city of Montpellièr, a midsized administrative center and market hub on the southern coast of France. Between the lists of every chapel and wigmaker in the city, Darnton senses a great deal about the anonymous bourgeois’s attitudes toward both the nobility and clergy above him, and the artisans and peasants below. Identifying these attitudes, Darnton points out, is important to understanding the French Revolution, in which the bourgeoisie—infused with wealth but lacking political power—persuaded the rest of the Third Estate to rise up against the nobility and the clergy for equal treatment under the law.
The anonymous bourgeois begins his tract by framing the city’s notable individuals in a parade, a common idiom used to describe French urban society in the Old Regime. He lists the high and low clergy first, followed by the city’s noble houses, and finally prominent members of the Third Estate: civil authorities, doctors, lawyers, and merchants. As the anonymous bourgeois lists the predicted income of each individual, it becomes clear that wealth and power are not neatly arranged across the three Estates, despite The Description’s initial treatment of Montpellièr society as an ordered hierarchy. For example, the merchants were among the wealthiest individuals in town. By contrast, the lower clergy possessed little wealth and only marginal political power. In fact, according to the anonymous bourgeois, the clergy as a whole in Montpellièr lacked in influence compared to their counterparts in other French cities. Moreover, the relatively small number of noble houses in Montpellièr meant that the bourgeois and the nobility intermingled freely.
This last observation feeds into some of the anonymous bourgeois’s most telling attitudes surrounding French society, which emerge in the second half of The Description. The bourgeois abruptly abandons the traditional Estate structure and invents his own conception of French society. His “First Estate”—characterized in quotation marks because the formulation is his alone—is the nobility; the clergy he ignores entirely because they lack influence in Montpellièr. His “Second Estate” is the bourgeoisie to which he belongs. And finally, his “Third Estate” includes everyone else.
Within the “Third Estate,” the anonymous bourgeois identifies three tiers. On the highest rung are artisans who both design and make things; on the next rung are mechanical artisans who merely make things; on the last rung are day laborers, farmers, and other members of the working poor. Excluded from his list are servants and the unemployed, both of whom he holds in very low regard. At one point, the anonymous bourgeois argues that all servants should be made to wear some kind of patch or article of clothing identifying them as such. Darnton points out that while the social structure the anonymous bourgeois concocts has little in common with the reality across 18th-century France, it is oddly prophetic; the society he envisions is very much like the one that arose after the French Revolution, in which wealth above all else conferred power and standing. That said, the anonymous bourgeois is also unimpressed by the potential of industrialization and therefore blind to how a great deal of that wealth would be amassed over the coming century.
The anonymous bourgeois’s decision to separate his own class from the rest of the traditional Third Estate is the earliest sign that he viewed the underclass with a measure of disdain. Later, the bourgeois is far more explicit in his antipathy toward the common people, referring to them as “naturally bad, licentious, and inclined toward rioting and pillage” (141). He fears the massive crime wave, real or imagined, sweeping through Montpellièr and bemoans the poor manners of his “Third Estate.” By the end of The Description, the manuscript devolves into a treatise on eating, drinking, and recreation habits. In the bourgeois’s telling, the habits of the nobility and the bourgeoisie are inevitably good, while the habits of the commoners are inevitably bad.
The key point Darnton stresses about these attitudes is that, as the nobility descends in terms of self-importance and self-exaltation, and as education becomes more available to the common classes, wealthy members of the upper bourgeoisie were eager to ensure that the underclass were shut out of the new urban elite emerging across France. The rise of the so-called honnête homme, or “honest man,” the label for the wealthy urban gentleman that the anonymous bourgeois applies to himself, persisted throughout the coming century, long after the French Revolution.
Chapter 3 Analysis
Of all of Darnton’s essays, this is arguably the most contentious and most fraught with political tensions. That’s because it focuses on one of the most slippery terms in all of European history: the bourgeois. Darnton himself refers to the term as “abusive, aggravating, inexact, and unavoidable” (109). Centuries after the Old Regime era, bourgeois is still used as an epithet to degrade or demean the supposed materialism and poor taste of the middle class—an insult that comes from both above and below, socioeconomically speaking. The term even comes in an abbreviated slang form tailored to the social media age: “bougie,” which is used to describe a person who believes they are a high-class individual but is perceived to behave like someone from the middle class.
Yet from the anonymous bourgeois’s Description, it is clear that the word was just as tendentious in 18th-century France as it is today. Consider that in his memoir, Contat repeatedly refers to his tyrannical master-artisan as a bourgeois, meaning it as an insult. Yet the anonymous bourgeois specifically excludes even the wealthiest artisans from the bourgeois and expresses deep frustration over the fact that “wealthy artisans owned silver table settings and ate just as well as the bourgeois” (134).
According to Darnton, the term is further complicated in the historical record by how Karl Marx and his followers situate the bourgeois in their philosophy. In Marxist theory the bourgeois are industrious capitalists and an economic ruling class that exploits the working class, which Marx refers to as the proletariat. While Darnton grants that some members of the bourgeoisie are indeed merchants and factory owners closely involved in coordinating the production of goods and powering the economy, the majority of them are merely rentiers, landowners who live comfortably off of rent payments and do very little work. Of Marx’s supposedly mythical bourgeois, Darnton writes, “Nowhere, except perhaps in Lille and one or two sectors of other cities, did the social historians find the dynamic, self-conscious, industrializing class imagined by the Marxists” (112). It should be noted, however, that Marx’s conception of the bourgeoisie is so confusing in this context partly because it encompasses more than the very strict definition the word has in France’s Old Regime; it also includes Europeans outside of France as well as Europeans in the 19th century.
For Darnton, however, the most important definition is the one the anonymous bourgeois gives to himself. Within the confines of Montpellièr at least, the bourgeois occupied a class all his own, one that was decidedly separate from the peasantry, poor laborers, and artisans. He asserts this, despite the fact that, legally speaking, the bourgeoisie was technically a part of the Third Estate, along with everyone else in France who wasn’t a member of the clergy or nobility. Once again, this reflects a fluidity surrounding class in the Old Regime that ran counter to the simplistic three-estate structure.
Moreover, the anonymous bourgeois’s identification with the upper classes supports Cobban’s revisionist argument that the French Revolution was a political struggle, not a class struggle. A given bourgeois may very likely have been as wealthy, if not more wealthy, than a member of the nobility. Thus, by instigating the French Revolution, the bourgeoisie sought not economic advancement but a seat at the political table. Furthermore, despite managing to recruit artisans and sans-culottes to their cause, the anonymous bourgeois—if his is at all representative of the bourgeoisie as whole—reflects the extent to which his class had little concern for the economic advancement of the underclass. In fact, based on the anonymous bourgeois’s deep antipathy toward the underclass, the bourgeoisie may have sought to actively forestall such advancement, a notion also supported by Cobban’s conclusion that the most vulnerable members of the underclass benefited little from the French Revolution.
Through the anonymous bourgeois, Darnton also explores the symbol of the honnête homme, or “honest man.” Though originally a term applied to the aristocracy alone, it plays a major role in the bourgeois’s view of himself as a gentleman. In Darnton’s telling, the term suggests “good manners, tolerance, reasonableness, restraint, clear thinking, fair dealing, and a healthy self-respect” (139). Conspicuously absent from the list is actual honesty, and indeed the term is not meant to denote literal trustworthiness per se, according to the Encyclopedia Britannica. (“Honnête homme.” Encyclopedia Britannica. Edinburgh: Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc. 2019.) In another telling example of how the underclass and the bourgeoisie used the same terms to mean different things, Contat also invokes the term honnête homme in his memoir at one point to describe the honor of the men in his printer’s guild, using it to reflect a lack of hypocrisy that is closer to the term’s literal definition. Given the term’s prominence among the bourgeoisie and the aristocracy, this may be yet another shining example of Contat’s ability to jigger with symbols to reflect irony.
Finally, The Description is notable for the anonymous bourgeois’s likely accidental talent for envisioning the world of the 19th century. Although he fails to grasp the importance of the factory and the coming Industrial Revolution, his formulation of the social order as one in which wealth confers status above all else is strikingly similar to the world that emerged after the French Revolution. Of the anonymous bourgeois’s conception of class, Darnton writes, “For as a perception of reality, it shaped reality itself, and it was to impose its shape on the next hundred years of French history, the century not only of Marx but also of Balzac” (140). What he seems to suggest here is that for all the social upheaval that took place due to the French Revolution, France in the 19th century was still dominated by what was all but in name an aristocracy—hence the reference to the 19th-century author Honoré de Balzac, whose novels are generally set within the halls of wealth and power.
