The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History

"This is a wonderful collection of short essays, very much on cultural history. It looks at individual people, individual places, individual topics, and draws out big themes. There’s a fantastic article in it about people responding to Rousseau, showing some of the emotional responses they had to Julie, which Darnton reckons is the bestselling book in eighteenth-century France. In another wonderful piece, my favourite in the collection, Darnton looks at fairy tales. He takes a source which is quite tricky and clearly not true in the traditional, Eltonian sense and looks at what cultural world it tells us about, how it reflects peasant society. I was very struck by the fact that in most of the fairy tales he looks at — they’re all nasty and bloody, but we all know that — when the hero wins, he doesn’t become the prince or marry, he gets a pot of porridge that’s never empty or he wins a minor battle of wits against the local aristocrat. It’s a very small scale of victory and Darnton particularly emphasises this in continental European contexts. It shows that people’s ambition was to survive. He uses these stories people told to children to get into cultural mindsets. The classic article from this collection is the one that gives the title. It’s about these apprentices in Paris who think their mistress is spending more money on her cats than on looking after them. They have a mock trial and hang all her cats — she’s quite upset about this. There are all these questions about whether it’s a sexual attack on her, because of the connotations of cats with female sexuality, and how far there are class distinctions emerging in eighteenth-century Paris between the journeyman class and the bourgeois. Darnton has a quite Marxist take on the whole thing. We don’t know whether the massacre actually happened. It’s based on a story told later. For me, the realisation that sometimes it doesn’t matter if a story is objective truth was very important. It’s the same with the fairy tales: fact is not just the physical things that happen, fact is also the way things are represented, the stories people tell. That was very influential on me, as a young PhD student who thought we always had to work out what actually happened. Absolutely. I think that’s true. One of my favourite things to ask students at interview is, ‘What do we do with literary sources?’ Often the first thing they say is, ‘We don’t know whether they’re true.’ It’s a very plausible way for them to think. But, yes, we don’t just live in a world where everything is material. We live in a world that is heavily influenced by the culture that we imbibe. That culture is not just based on fact. Particularly if you look at the early modern period, it’s based on ideas about magic and God, which are intrinsically neither provable nor factual. I think we do a massive disservice to people in the past by not engaging with them and that cultural world on their own terms. The work of people like Keith Thomas did do a good job of engaging with relatively ordinary people and trying to understand their cultural world. For that we have to look at things like literature, it’s one of the best sources for it. In the sixteenth century, cats had all kinds of strange connotations: female sexuality, magic, diabolic magic — the traditional view of the witch with the cat does have some grounding in history."