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

Given the peculiarities of the Irish educational system, at the end of 10th grade there was a forced choice between physics and history, so my formal study of history ended when I was 14. I was happy to be rid of it at the time - my brain did fine with analytical stuff like science and languages, but history was just too unruly to get a handle on and it always brought down my grade average. And, of course, at age 14 it was completely impossible to think of it as anything but useless.

Naturally, I've ended up regretting that particular gap in my education ever since. The Great Cat Massacre was one of the books that helped me overcome my aversion to reading about history ( I Claudius was another). It showed that history books didn't have to be dull and it re-awakened a curiosity I thought had been stifled. It also planted a strong suspicion that my previous difficulties with the subject were most likely due to the abysmal way in which it was taught. It seems silly now, but when I first read it (in 1985?) a "history" book that wasn't just a compilation of names, dates, battles and rebellions was (for me) an entirely novel concept. So I had fond memories of the book when I undertook a re-reading this past weekend. After 25 years, would it be as good as I remembered, or would it crumble to little more than that inspired title (which is pure genius, by any standards)?

A brief overview of the book's structure and content. It comprises six essays, each of which considers a very specific aspect of life in France during the first half of the 18th century, using a particular incident or set of documents as a point of departure. The cat massacre in the book's title stimulates an examination of the precarious state of labor relations in the printing industry in the 1730s. An extensive description of the town of Montpellier in 1768 by an anonymous (but solidly bourgeois) citizens provides a remarkable glimpse of the power structure, relationships between the different classes and prevailing attitudes. Part of the responsibility of Joseph d'Hemery, a Parisian police officer, was the tracking of potentially seditious documents and their authors - as a result he amassed an archive containing dossiers on 500 writers and intellectuals. Ten years of book orders from one resident of La Rochelle in the 1770s give some idea of reading habits at the time (Rousseau was the decade's Stephenie Meyer). In the remaining two chapters Darnton considers the particularly gruesome nature of French folk tales and the organization of Diderot's Encyclopedia respectively.

I suppose it was no great surprise to find that, although the book wasn't quite as brilliant or as fascinating as I remembered, it still held up pretty well. Darnton is very readable, though I found some of his inferences less persuasive on this second reading. The best essays are the title piece and the analysis of folktales; the glimpse into 18th century reading habits is also pretty irresistible. The other three essays were (for me) more problematic - there's an awful lot of listing going on, with Darnton's commentary being either perfunctory or unpersuasive, or both.

Overall, the flaws are still pretty minor. Darnton is an intelligent and engaging writer, and the three standout essays in the collection are more than worth the price of admission. Though I'm mentally giving it 3.5 stars this time around, I'm more than happy to round it back to the original 4 stars.