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

by Robert Darnton

Overview

The landmark history of France and French culture in the eighteenth-century, a winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize


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 the distinguished Harvard historian Robert Darnton answers The Great Cat Massacre, a kaleidoscopic view of European culture during in what we like to call "The Age of Enlightenment." A classic of European history, it is an essential starting point for understanding Enlightenment France.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780465012749
Publisher:	Basic Books
Publication date:	05/12/2009
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	320
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.10(h) x 1.00(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