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 4Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 4 Summary: “A Police Inspector Sorts His Files: The Anatomy of the Republic of Letters”
Having explored the attitudes of the peasant, the artisan, and the urban bourgeois, Darnton turns his attention to a less easily classifiable member of 18th-century French society: the intellectual. Part of the reason the intellectual doesn’t fit neatly into the social order is that the term “intellectual,” or any other corresponding label, had yet to be invented in the mid-18th century. Later in the book, Darnton explores in great detail three of the most influential writers of this era: Denis Diderot, Jean Le Rond d’Alembert, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. For now, what most interests him are the attitudes and lived experiences of relatively ordinary writers living in Paris around 1750.
To grasp these attitudes, Darnton relies on a particularly novel source: the police files of Inspector Joseph d’Hémery, a Parisian detective assigned to monitor authors in the city. Between 1748 and 1753, d’Hémery wrote reports on 501 intellectuals living in Paris, all but 67 of whom were published writers. They included some of the most celebrated writers in Western history, including the aforementioned Diderot and Rousseau, and also Voltaire—although Voltaire’s influence peaked in the previous era of Louis XIV.
From these files, Darnton stitches together a rough demographic portrait of the literary scene in Paris at mid-century. The median age was 38—the same age as Rousseau in 1850—and a full third were born in Paris, which to Darnton runs counter to the conventional wisdom among historians that all but a few of the city’s writers were from the provinces. Twelve percent belonged to the clergy, another 17% were nobility, and the remaining 71% belonged to the Third Estate. How many of these belonged to the bourgeoisie, Darnton argues, depends on one’s definition of the term. Most earned a living as teachers, journalists, secretaries, librarians, actors, or in sinecures, low-stress positions given to authors who obtained a wealthy “protector.” A smaller number might have been considered members of the upper bourgeoisie, including doctors, state bureaucrats, and magistrates. To Darnton’s surprise, 6% were shopkeepers, artisans, or other relatively low-income workers. An even larger number, 19%, were the children of low-income workers. None were peasants, and only 16 of the published authors were women.
Darnton also points out that 10% of the writers were locked in prison—usually the Bastille—at some point either before, during, or after the five-year period covered by d’Hémery’s files. The most common crimes were libel and writing anti-French pamphlets. More serious were the crimes of Emmanuel Jean de la Coste, a former monk who received a life sentence on the galley slave ships for prostituting out a young girl to support himself after being excommunicated from the church.
What’s most striking to Darnton about d’Hémery’s files is that the inspector possesses a fairly advanced sense of literary taste. In addition to comments on the shapes of the writers’ faces and the threat posed by their writing, d’Hémery is not shy about sharing his insights regarding the quality of the subject’s prose in his files—even though, as far as Darnton can tell, the files are intended to be read solely by police officers. Some files list the names of police informants charged with infiltrating the Parisian literary circles. Others, like one on French playwright Charles-Simon Favart, read like the folktales in Chapter 1. Favart won the heart of a powerful soldier’s mistress, and the two successfully escaped together to live happily ever after.
The files also strongly reflect the influence peddling that ran rampant in Paris’s literary circles. Given that even wildly successful authors failed to profit to a significant degree in the proto-marketplace of 18th-century France, many looked for wealthy protectors from the nobility who would provide patronage, often in the form of sinecures. As a result, authors like Jean Dromgold wrote in excessively flattering terms about various noblemen in pamphlets or newspaper reviews, hoping to earn their protection and support. Just as often, authors wrote scurrilous attacks of a nobleman’s rival to gain favor, hence the scourge of libel that troubled d’Hémery just as much as dangerous ideology.
Finally, Darnton points out the conspicuous absence of any mention of the Enlightenment—despite the fact that it is generally considered the most important movement of Western thought and philosophy of the entire 18th century, and Paris was its epicenter. At the same time, Darnton adds that d’Hémery implicitly senses the importance of the movement in his estimation of Diderot—arguably the most influential writer in terms of spreading Enlightenment thought—as being among the most dangerous writers in Paris.
Chapter 4 Analysis
Like Contat’s memoir and the Description manuscript, d’Hémery’s police files offer an extraordinarily rare glimpse at how relatively ordinary individuals thought in 18th-century France. As always, the question of how representative d’Hémery is of his social milieu is an issue, and judging by the fact that this police officer’s files frequently read like the work of an amateur literary critic, the man seems to have been anything but typical. Even still, d’Hémery’s files are valuable for two reasons: First, they tell the story of the Enlightenment, one of the most dynamic eras in the history of Western thought, from the perspective of an ordinary outsider. Second, they provide a rough demographic sketch of the intellectuals involved in that movement.
According to Darnton, the term “intellectual” had not yet been coined by the time d’Hémery wrote his files. Furthermore, the fact that intellectuals and writers could be found across all three Estates once again reflects a measure of fluidity found in the class structure in 18th-century France. With no status endemic to their trade, intellectuals mirror the rest of French society, with protection and sinecures provided by aristocratic literary enthusiasts, most of whom belonged to the Third Estate. Moreover, owing to the primitive nature of the early book marketplace and the scourge of piracy, an intellectual could no more easily make a fortune as a writer than a shopkeeper could join the ranks of the wealthiest merchants. Of intellectuals’ uneasy place in the social stratum of the Old Regime and the difficulty of classifying them within the existing order, Darnton writes, “Given the conceptual cloudiness surrounding this uncertain position, what sort of status did he have?” (172). This is strongly reflected in d’Hémery’s tendency to refer to writers as “boys” (173), even when the term applied to 37-year-olds with wives and children, like Diderot.
One might assume that d’Hémery’s chief objective in monitoring writers was to stamp out dangerous ideological thought, like atheism or antimonarchism. While this was indeed a concern for him, libel was an equally troubling crime to the inspector. This widespread pillorying of the nobility was a direct result, Darnton writes, of the protection system that offered financial support for so many writers. This reflects not only the inadequacy of the protection system but also the extent to which the nascent publishing industry was ill-suited to handle the huge outpouring of books that accompanied the Enlightenment Era. While data on French book production is harder to come by, statistics from England show the rate of book publication doubling between 1650 and 1750, and then tripling between 1750 and 1790. It wasn’t until the 19th century’s Industrial Revolution, however, that mass production of books allowed successful writers to make a living outside the protection system.
Aside from the French folktales, perhaps nowhere else in the book does one see Darnton’s notion of “Frenchness” (61) espoused so clearly than in d’Hémery’s police reports. More than any particular ideology or writing style, the inspector values cleverness above all else in his estimations of the various writers. As particularly clever writers navigate the protection system and use their cunning to gain temporary victories over the aristocracy, their stories as related in d’Hémery’s files almost read like French folktales. Of the inspector’s appreciation of French cunning, Darnton writes, “Esprit (cleverness) was his favorite term. It seems to have been the first thing that he looked for in a writer, and it compensated for a good deal of straying from the straight and narrow” (157). Just like the peasants sharing their folktales, d’Hémery sensed that to make it in this world as a member of the underclass, certain ethical lapses must be tolerated.
Finally, through d’Hémery, Darnton examines how an ordinary French citizen who existed outside the intellectual social circles of the salon and the garrets viewed the Enlightenment. On the one hand, the inspector never even mentions the movement by name, as Darnton writes, “The intellectual tide that appears as a mainstream of cultural history in most textbooks does not surface in the police reports” (185). At the same time, d’Hémery is implicitly aware of Enlightenment values—even if they go unnamed—and can sense the danger they pose to the status quo. It is no accident, for example, that the inspector terms Diderot—the movement’s central figure in the middle of the 18th century—as “extremely dangerous” (185). More than libelists and even poor writers, d’Hémery reserves the greatest amount of scorn for those like Diderot who question the current formulation of church and state along with religion more broadly, two ideas that were hugely influential on the future revolutionaries of 1789. That d’Hémery is intensely cognizant of the importance of this suggests that while not everybody in Paris explicitly recognized the Enlightenment as a formal movement, its ideas were definitely in the air.
