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.
Symbols & Motifs
Cats
No symbol is more rich with meaning for Darnton than the humble cat. As the victim of the book’s titular massacre, the cat begs a close reading by Darnton in an effort to determine why the slaughter took place and why it was so singularly funny to Contat and his compatriots. On the most basic level, cats exist within the massacre as a symbol of inequality between master and apprentice. The master feeds his cat roast chicken while the apprentice is fed spoiled cat food. The incessant all-night howling of cats gives voice to the misery felt by Contat each night as he struggled to sleep amid miserable conditions. On a deeper level still, cats symbolize witchcraft, a connection made explicit in Contat’s memoir, and one which Darnton reads as evidence that the massacre was partly designed to accuse the mistress of witchery. Moreover, the sexual connotations of cats is made clear in the memoir’s charged language, as Contat refers to the mistress’s “pussy” (104) at least four times. Finally, the role of the cat in various charivari rituals suggests that the hanging of dead cats around the master’s home was an implicit accusation of cuckoldry.
One may be rightly tempted to question the extent to which Darnton reads symbolic resonance in the great cat massacre. He justifies his reading by looking to the field of anthropology, writing:
“Anthropologists have demonstrated again and again that ordinary people manipulate symbols in this manner. So there is nothing extravagant about the notion that cats symbolized witchcraft, sexuality, and domesticity—or that the ritual murder of them was meant simultaneously as a trial, a gang rape, a rebellion of the workers against their boss, and a carnivalesque kind of street theater, which the workers later repeated in the form of pantomime” (xviii).
The Honnête Homme
Honnête homme is among the labels the anonymous bourgeois applies to himself on multiple occasions in his Description manuscript. Although it literally translates into English as “honest man,” Darnton describes the term as reflecting the qualities of a “decent, well-bred citizen” (139). While it denotes fairness in personal and business dealings, it does not necessarily signify honesty. Rather, its greatest meaning is as a signifier of gentility and urbanity, which in the 18th century was increasingly embodied by the bourgeois
For that reason, it is extraordinarily telling when Contat uses the term in his memoir to describe the ideal member of his printer’s guild. Certainly there was nothing genteel about how the apprentices and journeymen viewed themselves; Contat freely admits to his cohort’s tendency toward all manner of drunkenness and brawling. Nor does it seem to reflect a desire to belong to the bourgeoisie, as Contat makes his negative attitude toward his “bourgeois” master abundantly clear. Instead, it may be another joke. By repurposing a term associated with the respectable gentlemen of the bourgeoisie to describe their own rowdy selves, Contat makes yet another jibe at the upper middle class. Another explanation may be that Contat deliberately appropriated the term in an effort to express its more literal meaning of honesty, a quality he likely sincerely valued, given his strong distaste for hypocrisy.
The Figurative System of Human Knowledge
Given the amount of space Darnton devotes to explaining the various nodes of Diderot and d’Alembert’s Figurative System of Human Knowledge in their Encyclopédie, it is clear that he understands the power of this symbol to express the editors’ ideas about religion. It offers an opportunity for Diderot to subjugate religion to philosophy and other arts and sciences by placing theology on a distant node below the main trunk of knowledge. The visual impact of seeing theology sit on a branch so precariously close to black magic must surely have had an effect on contemporary readers, pious and impious alike. Finally, given Darnton’s characterization of d’Alembert’s preface as muddled and confusing, the visual aid of the knowledge tree appears to be the more powerful component of the editors’ two-pronged epistemological strategy.
