The Great Cat Massacre Review
The Great Cat Massacre entails understanding history differently. It is the story of vengeance of some ill fed journeymen at the face of their bourgeoisie master’s attitude. The pranksters carry out their master plan by killing the Cats and then staging a mock trial. What the author point outs is the humor that they share at the face of this cruelty and he urges the reader to understand the Rabelaian humor contextualizing the event against the backdrop of the peasant society of the Ancien Regime. Darnton shows why they chose the cats and how cats are metaphoric in western linguistic and cultural tradition. He brilliantly depicts the relation Cats bare with female sexuality, witchcraft, routine slangs and so on. The killing of cats is not just a frenzy killing that came out of a berserk reaction against the bourgeoisie, but it was metaphorically ravaging the bourgeoisie master whom they cannot reach out for physically at least. In the analysis of folklores of the Red Riding Hood or the La Renarde Darnton believes that these folklores help us understanding the pulse of the peasant society of France. He gives an entire overview of the French peasantry and the hardships they endured following, which he gives a fascinating folktale of the Sorcerer’s Apprentice, which includes a number of shape shifting charisma of the man and the devil following the eventual victory of man and the author follows that this reflected the essential idea of fighting over scarce resources. The use of culture here is “strictly in the Geertzian sense, as expressed, for example, in The Interpretation of Cultures as "an historically transmitted pattern of meanings embodied in symbols, a system of inherited conceptions expressed in symbolic form by means of which men communicate, perpetuate and develop their knowledge about and attitudes towards life." Under what conditions can a historian legitimately make use of a definition of this sort? What attitude does it imply vis-a-vis texts