Reviews

• This is a mainstay of eighteenth-century studies, particularly those which focus on the Ancien Régime. Darnton is a distinguished historian and a MacArthur prize fellow. THE GREAT CAT MASSACRE is a study of the French mentality some two and a half centuries ago. The ‘method’ is to take documents/events that make little sense to us (why would individuals massacre cats?) and then burrow into the subject, contextualize the events and, in the process, acquire a greater understanding of how the French mind worked (then). There are two main problems with this which Darnton acknowledges (p. 261): how representative are the subjects under investigation and how much real evidence can be adduced to support the modern historian’s claims? By definition this is a set of related but ultimately disparate essays. The subjects include contemporary reworkings of traditional fairy tales/folklore; the killing of cats; a bourgeois commentator’s textual ‘organization’ of a city; a police inspector’s files on French writers/authors; the organization of the world via a ‘tree of knowledge’ in the French encyclopedia vs. the organization in Bacon and Ephraim Chambers (whose Cyclopedia served as the model for d’Alembert and Diderot’s work); and, finally, the readers’ response to an epistolary novel by Rousseau and the manner in which that mirrors an emerging Romantic sensibility. The book is fascinating but each reader will find some chapters far more interesting than others. I preferred the chapters on fairy tales, writers and the cat massacre, with the chapter on Rousseau coming in fourth. The bourgeois’ city was of less interest and the tree of knowledge chapter is hard to keep straight in your head, despite the lucidity of Darnton’s prose. There is simply too great a volume of information to be encompassed, digested and utilized by way of comparison/contrast. In general this is a lively book, filled with interesting information. While some would descend into opaque, highly theoretical prose to discuss this sort of material, Darnton does not. His clarity and straightforwardness will, as a result, endear him to readers. Highly recommended.

• In his brilliant ‘History of Histories’ (2007) the late John Burrow recommended this book as a leading example of microhistory, along with Carlo Ginzburg’s ‘Cheese and the Worms’, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie’s ‘Montaillou’ and Eamonn Duffy’s ‘Voices of Morebath’; but it differs from the others in that it is not just about one individual, or place. In fact ‘The Great Cat Massacre’ is only one of six episodes in 18th century French cultural history, studied here by Robert Darnton. It is indeed a classic of its kind, which is intellectual history or 'mentalités', as the 'Annalistes' would have it. The common theme is that we should not assume that people in the past thought the same way as we do, and we should avoid the use of hindsight. So, one might assume that, since all the individuals in question lived before the French Revolution of 1789, and since times and conditions for all but the aristocracy and bourgeoisie were hard, the book would tell us something about why that seminal event in Western history took place when it did, and what it was all about. Not a bit of it. Darnton’s chapter on ‘Peasant Tales’ tells us that these stories reflected the desire of the poor and downtrodden to make fun of, and get the better of, their masters metaphorically, not a desire to physically overthrow them. The chapter about the Great Cat Massacre is also entitled ‘Workers Revolt’, but its subject is not a revolt but a gruesome charivari. The eponymous Bourgeois in ‘The City as Text’ describes his town of Montpellier in terms of the three traditional estates, and other marks of status, rather than in terms of class. The Police Inspector, who sorts his files regarding potential opponents of the Ancien Regime in chapter 4, does not file them according to ideology, but according to his tastes in literature. And so on. Nowhere is there the faintest whiff of revolution, or revolutionaries, and the reason, according to Darnton, is clear: in the middle of the 18th century, men simply did not think of the world in the same way as they came to think of it after 1789, and especially after the writings of Karl Marx became widely known. This is a brilliant study; and one wonders how much would be left of the traditional idea that Montesquieu, Voltaire, Diderot and Rousseau were in any sense responsible for the French Revolution, if Darnton were to turn his attention to the subject in full. Even more intriguing, what would remain of Christopher Hill’s thesis in ‘Intellectual Origins of the English Revolution’, that men gained courage to overthrow Charles I by reading the works of Bacon, Ralegh and Coke.

• Muito bom, o livro é de ótima qualidade e foi enviado dentro do prazo. Por ser importado o papel é padrão estado unidense, inferior ao brasileiro.

• Convoluted way of expressing himself

• I very much enjoyed The Great Cat Massacre, as I not only learned much about the quotidian day-to-day of a fascinating bygone culture ... but I also learned (via the author's crackling, accessible and compelling prose) how even the most minute aspects of the societal components investigated in the book hold significant importance today in the Western World. The book reads almost like a novel and there are many "a-HA!" or "wow, who woulda thunkit?" moments throughout. A true history book that reads like a farce or even, at times, a suspense thriller, answering the greatest detective novel question of all: "HOW?" I highly recommend the book to anyone interested in cultural history, revolutionary politics or simply (truly) a great "beach novel" that has more substance than your average Dan Brown.

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