The Great Cat Massacre

The Great Cat Massacre by Robert Darnton is a collection of six essays that examines the cultural history of France in the first half of the eighteenth century. These essays engage an array of documents in order to reconstruct the world views of French society- an attempt at the history of mentality (p. 5). The title refers to the most well-known of these essays which focuses on a set of incidents that occurred within the printing industry during the 1730s. These incidents were a result of poor labor relations between printers who worked and lived on the Rue Saint- Severin in Paris and their apprentices (p. 76). The latter of which were subjected to poor working conditions, beatings, and near starvation at the hands of their teacher. All the

He argues that the association of cats with witchcraft and female sexuality means the massacre was a metaphorical rape of the mistress and therefore is a gesture of rebellion (p. 93-96). This logic seems a little faulty to me. I can understand the link between cats and sexuality, but I do not think that this correlation means every act of malice towards a cat is actually an affront on female sexuality. I think it’s entirely possible that these apprentices, without any deeper meaning or innuendo, were just jealous of the cats and reacted violently. Darnton would have been more successful in this argument had he been able to provide any evidence that these men were not only aware of the symbols associated but also allowed these symbols to influence their modes of thinking. For example, a retelling of the massacre in an oral performance from someone who experienced it firsthand in which the mistress was accused of witchcraft or sexually derogatory terms were applied to the

In reality, there are people still to this day that enjoy animal cruelty. Yet, Darnton truly cannot fathom why the death of animals seemed comical to these men (p. 81) and over interprets in order to understand. His observations of the worker’s mentalities are then flawed because he sees them as the exception to human compassion, which he has to justify, rather than as a normal human response to gruesome stimuli. History has proven that human beings enjoy violence as seen in the gladiator battles of Ancient Rome and the millionaire boxers and wrestlers of the 21st century. Therefore, I believe Darnton’s assumptions of symbols and meaning are too rationalized to explain the workers’ primal appreciation for violence in a hostile