Robert Darnton.
The Great Cat Massacre: and other episodes in French cultural history.
Basic Books. 1984
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 capture, why did they find it hilarious—so funny,
in fact that 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 Montpellier 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 answers in The Great Cat Massacre,
a kaleidoscopic view of European culture during what we like to call the “Age of Enlightenment.”