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

by Robert Darnton

Overview

When the apprentices of a Paris printing shop in the 1730's 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 18th 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 attempts to answer in this dazzling series of essays that probe the ways of thought in what we like to call "The Age of Enlightenment."

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780394729275
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	02/28/1985
Edition description:	1st Vintage Books ed
Pages:	320
Product dimensions:	5.15(w) x 7.95(h) x 0.70(d)
Lexile:	1320L (what's this?)

About the Author

A former professor of European history at Princeton University, Robert Darnton is Carl H. Pforzheimer University Professor and director of the Harvard University Library. The founder of the Guttenberg-e program, he is the author of many books. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Table of Contents

	List of Illustrations	ix
	Acknowledgments	xiii
	Introduction	3
1	Peasants Tell Tales: The Meaning of Mother Goose	9
2	Workers Revolt: The Great Cat Massacre of the Rue Saint-Severin	75
3	A Bourgeois Puts His World in Order: The City as a Text	107
4	A Police Inspector Sorts His Files: The Anatomy of the Republic of Letters	145
5	Philosophers Trim the Tree of Knowledge: The Epistemological Strategy of the Encyclopedie	191
6	Readers Respond to Rousseau: The Fabrication of Romantic Sensitivity	215
	Conclusion	257
	Notes	265
	Index	285

Editorial Reviews

"Robert Darnton has the inquisitiveness of an investigative reporter, the thoroughness of a rigorous scholar, and the sensitivity of a novelist."—New Republic

"Brilliant....The job description for the historian is simple; he must read well. Darnton does. He will read anything, take it seriously, and, applying a fertile imagination, write beautifully about what he has learned."—Washington Post Book World

"An exercise in culture shock."—Chronicle of Higher Education

From the Publisher