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The Great Cat Massacre: And Other Episodes in French Cultural History | Robert Darnton

1 post | 4 read | 1 reading | 2 to read

When the apprentices of a Paris printing shop in the 1730s held a series of mock trials and then hanged all the cats they could lay their hands on, why did they find it so hilariously funny that they choked with laughter when they reenacted it in pantomime some twenty times? Why in the eighteenth-century version of "Little Red Riding Hood" did the wolf eat the child at the end? What did the anonymous townsman of Montpelier have in mind when he kept an exhaustive dossier on all the activities of his native city? These are some of the provocative questions Robert Darnton answers in this classic work of European history in what we like to call ?The Age of Enlightenment.OCO"

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The Great Cat Massacre: And Other Episodes in French Cultural History | Robert Darnton

so-so

This book offers to explore episodes in French cultural history or what the author calls the history of mentalités. It‘s fairly dry and not every episode is terribly compelling, but the highlights are the discussion of how original folktales help us understand the worldview of the 18th century peasant, how cats were equated with female power and sexuality and how a Rousseau novel inspired reading for amusement and obsessive behavior from fans.

3 likes