The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History

“When we cannot get a proverb, or a joke, or a ritual, or a poem, we know we are on to something.”

This is the earliest and clearest expression of the author’s methodology. Borrowing techniques from anthropology, he is drawn to the incomprehensible in his research on 18th-century France. This approach allows fascinating insights to surface from exceedingly odd incidents and attitudes, most notably the great cat massacre and the anonymous bourgeois’s beguiling manuscript.

“And so it goes, from rape and sodomy to incest and cannibalism. Far from veiling their message with symbols, the storytellers of eighteenth-century France portrayed a world of raw and naked brutality.”

This quote expresses the extent to which French folklore reflects the harsh reality of peasant life in 18th-century France. More than that, the fact that peasants refused to veil some of the most graphic elements of their stories in symbolism and innuendo suggests that efforts by 20th-century psychologists to parse these tales for hidden messages of the collective unconscious were done in vain. Finally, this example offers a counterpoint to Contat’s cat massacre, which by necessity is rich with symbolism and hidden meanings.

“Event history, histoire événementielle, generally took place over the heads of the peasantry, in the remote world of Paris and Versailles. While ministers came and went and battles raged, life in the village continued unperturbed, much as it had always been since times beyond the reach of memory."

The author’s histoire des mentalités approach sits in opposition to event history, in which history is sorted by major happenings like wars, rebellions, and deposed monarchs. While he doesn’t explicitly dismiss event history outright, Darnton criticizes its usefulness in determining the attitudes of ordinary individuals. While this is especially true of the peasantry, whose lives were marked by stable misery for centuries, later chapters show that the attitudes of other individuals like