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

The Great Cat Massacre with out a doubt has one of the most unusual titles ever created especially for a book about history. Now this unusual title perhaps fits this book better than any other straight - forward title Mr. Darnton could have conjured. You see the text contained in the book isn’t just your standardized, boring, and redundant view of history. Most historical text looks at history from a political standpoint, of which king did what and what were the political effects of a war; then what were the politics like after the war, how were they changed and by which major political figures did the changing. Darnton instead of the old style of viewing history looks at it through the eyes of the people, and not the figures of history. Mr. Darnton’s book The Great Cat Massacre, reexamines French culture during the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteen century with the eyes of the peasant’s. Robert Darnton looks at the writings of the peasant’s, and traces them to their origins and compares them to other text of similar origins and text, to create credible accounts or views of particular topics of the people during the era. In this review your going to see a summarization of the book, describing the various subjects of this book. After that I will comment on Mr. Darnton’s on some topics like his organization, writing style, and fairness to his subject material, then discuss the historical importance of the topics that Robert Darnton mentions in his book and give you my personal opinion of the book its self. Next I will discuss with you a battery of topics like why I choose the book, is the book controversial, what was the authors purpose for writing the book, what were some of the major theses, who or what Darnton’s sources were? Lastly I will end this review with a compare and contrast of potentially different views of what Robert Darnton is telling us in his book.

Robert Darnton starts The Great Cat Massacre with a rather repulsive version of Little Red Riding Hood. Red Riding Hood unknowingly eats her grandmother and drinks her blood, to be stripped naked and then eaten by the wolf. Now this is one of the earliest versions of this story ever found in fact Little Red doesn’t even have a name she’s just the “little girl”. (Darnton Pg. 9) Darnton later explains that this version was the first recorded from oral tradition pas...

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... Chartier is trying to establish is that it’s better to dive more into the idea of popular culture examining other sources to gain an the insight of a smaller demographic than that of Darnton’s “Idea of Popular Culture”

In conclusion of this review lengthy of The Great Cat Massacre; I’ve given a rather lengthy insight into the book, Mr. Darnton’s motivation for writing the book, and a different view of the The Great Cat Massacre with the aid of Roger Chartier. In retrospect I enjoyed reading this book very much, however I do not feel that it was the best book for this review. The book itself was looking at history in a different way and it made it extremely difficult to compare or contrast it with another source. Mr. Darnton whose views in my opinion are sound it’s just that are very narrow questions about a very large subject “French Culture” and it was hard to locate different opinions.

Works Cited

Darnton, Robert. The Great Cat Massacre: And Other Episodes in French Cultural History. First Edition. New York: Basic Books, 1999

Dewald, Jonathan. Roger Chartier and the fate of cultural history. French Historical Studies, Baton Rouge, Spring 1998