Darnton, Robert.  "Workers Revolt," Chap. in The Great Cat Massacre
     and Other Episodes in French Cultural History New York: Basic
     Books, 1984.

     Robert Darnton wrote "The Great Cat Massacre" to illustrate
the vast cultural gulf between present-day readers and their
historical subjects.  In this case, Darnton uses an anecdote of
insult and violence in an 18th-century Parisian printing shop to
illustrate the mentalite of the anecdote's author and, by
extension, the actors in the actual event.  In the process, Darnton
reveals the strengths and limitations inherent in extrapolating a
thick, multilayered description into narrative history.
     Darnton relies heavily on the first-hand account of Nicolas
Contat, a worker in the shop of Jacques Vincent.  Printers, being
remarkable for their literacy (and perhaps narrative, theatric
culture), stood out from the other artisans of preindustrial Europe
as recorders of their own stories.  Darnton immediately defended
the usefulness of this primary source,  even though the story was
highly subjective and is not a factual recording of the actual
event.  Despite (or because) of this, the printer's story reveals
the cultural matrix which Darnton wishes to reveal.  Darnton
accepts this "meaningful fabrication" and suggests that if the
reader can suspend disbelief long enough to interact with the
anecdote as a work of fiction, the reader can access the
ethnological context (78).
     After Darnton immerses the reader in Contat's story (which
Darnton has thoughtfully provided as an appendix), he submits the
story to scrutiny against the background provided by a handful of
primary and secondary sources.  In sharp contrast to the subjective
nature of Contat's subjective, narrative anecdote, Darnton uses the
papers of the Societe typographique de Neuchatel, a body which,
though subsequent, provides an primary analog of sorts to the
earlier printing environment in Contat's Paris. 
     Darnton also displays a familiarity with literature sources,
such as that by Rabelais, Cervantes, and Zola, as well as secondary
sources by critics of the literature such as Bahktin.  His reliance
on language is further illustrated in his reliance on etymologies
of the German and French popular terms which help make his case
about the common nature of cat abuse.  In addition, Darnton refers
to such wide-ranging secondary sources as children's folkloric
vocabulary and anthropological works of the early 20th century,
such as seminal work of Van Gennep concerning ritual form and
meaning, Les Rites de passage.
     Darnton is quick to point out that we do not have access to
the cat-massacring event itself, but can only work with the
anecdotal artifact (78).  This, together with his reference to the
"thin" nature of Contat's account, alludes to the thick descriptive
method of Geertz (100).  Thwarted by his inability to be present at
the event, Darnton makes several passes at the Contat's tale,
accruing more and more layers of complexity, of depth, as the goes
on.  He submits the story to several strafing runs, adding
economic, public and guild ceremonial, religious, and sexual
context to the anecdotal artifact.
     Darnton's builds the first layer economically, a la Fernand
Braudel.  Using STN documents mentioned above, he paints in
economic and workplace details that offer the reader a first bit of
identification with the storyteller.  Darnton reveals the
conglomeration of independent printing shops into fewer and larger
shops in the latter half of the seventeenth century.  This
concentration of printshop control distorted the previous workable
(if unhappy) relationship between journeymen and masters.  In fact,
the masters disappeared from common view, declining in number and
retreating into a more distant, bourgeois lifestyle.  The reduction
in raw numbers of masters made promotion (or initiation) from
journey to master more unlikely, and more fiscal or political than
before.  
     To make matters even less comfortable, hirelings were brought
on as cheap, uninitiated labor, which further distorted the
economic (as well as social) nature of the printshop.  The common
pattern, then, was hostility toward the absent and demanding
masters, a tendency toward the itinerant, uncertain work schedules,
and volatile after-work carousing and violence.  Journeymen began
to be hired as an industrial-style commodity, chosen for their
sobriety and diligence rather than typesetting or pressing skills,
while wishing all the while for the reinstatement of some real or
imagined Utopian shop where the journeymen and masters performed
their roles in relative harmony.
     Darton's next layer is social, or ritual-social.  First,
Darnton introduces the concept of charivaris, a "burlesque
procession" accompanied by crude noisemaking ("rough music") (83). 
This carnival-related social behavior, critical also to works of
Mona Ozouf and Robert Muir, provides a structure onto which rule-
defining and -enforcing public censure can be hung.  As well as a
traditional incorporation of cat torture, carnival and charivaris
activities involved also an explosive mixture of sexual license and
implicit or explicit human violence.  Darnton lays out this
information, such as the chasers of flaming cats, and the burners
of bagged cats, so the reader might begin to account for the
seemingly aberrant behavior of the participants of the cat
massacre.
     In addition to public ceremonial carnival and charivaris
ritual elements, the printers had their own artisanal ritual
environment.  These included ceremonies and feasts honoring Saints
John the Evangelist, Jean Porte Latine, and Martin.  Frequently
held in the fraternity's chapel, these ceremonies took place in a
microrepublican political space, governed not by the economic
masters but by internal leadership (85).  The ceremonies were
marked by ritual payments and conduct, as were the ritual
advancements within the artisanal community.  
     A critical part of the ritual advancement was hazing and
mockery. This occurred, as Darnton mentions in his annotation, both
in an esoteric and ceremonial setting as well as the mundane
setting of the shop.<1>  This tradition of mockery figures
importantly in the readers understanding of the massacre.
     To finish off the matter of ceremonies, Darton contrasts the
devotion of the journeymen to their arcane fraternity to the
perceived hypocrisy and "pharisaical bourgeois morality" (89),
another key ingredient.
     Next Darnton adds a discussion of why cats proper figured in
the massacre and in the previously mentioned rituals.  Darnton
finds that the mysterious nature of cats, their "je ne sais quoi"
left them exposed to association with the satanic, the occult and
with witchcraft.  The cat populates a taboo space that gives it
talismanic power for charivaric and related events.  Common
expressions in the French and English languages reinforced the
cat's particular suitability for ritual and torture uses.  The
association of cats (and their Sabbatical howling) with witchcraft
figures intimately into the tale of the massacre.  It is by
mimicking cats, after all, that Leveille tricks the master into
ordering the removal of his wife's cats.
     Darnton constructs the final layer of analysis, that of
sexuality, by noting that the domain of cat power was the
household, and particularly the area of the mistress who owns the
cat.  This identification of the cat with the mistress and her
power may hold the key to the metonymic value of the cat to refer
to female sexual power and anatomy.
     Darnton points out the identity of the English term "pussy"
and the French "le chat," which gets the reader closer still to
understanding the deep meaning of the cat massacre.  In addition to
several folkloric associations between eating or owning cats and
sexual behavior or conception, Darnton explains that the actual
howling of cats in heat (or battle) sounded like sexual longing to
eighteenth-century ears.  

     Pulling all these layers together, Darnton offers that the
journeymen were drawing on a cultural vocabulary of charivaris,
superstitious and sexual imagery involving cats, and utopian
concepts of the journeyman-master relationship when they undertook
the cat massacre (and the subsequent, repeated copies alluding to
the event).  In attacking the cats (by deliberately misinterpreting
the master's order) the journeymen were attacking by proxy the
mistress sexually, while at the same time suggesting she was a
witch, and also insinuating  by their caterwauling that the master
was being cuckolded by the mistresses' young confessor.  This
mocking of the master and his wife brought him, figuratively, and
for a short while literally, down and outside his bourgeois home
and into the raucous fray the journeymen enjoyed. Although the
master may have missed the complex set of insinuations the
journeymen made, the mistress realized the magnitude and
ramifications of the journeymen's mockery and assault on the
masters position and possessions. Because of the encoded nature of
the insults, the journeymen escaped direct punishment and survived
to preserve the memory in their riotous laughter at the copies.  
     Darnton's multilayered and attentive dissection of a seemingly
unimportant (even if odd) event and participation of homo ludens
recalls Geertz' thick description, and he appears to utilize that
method's vocabulary at times.  Concerning the actual subject
matter, Lawrence Stone, in "The Revival of Narrative", notes that
histories of sex or violence play to the audience's natural
voyeuristic tendencies.  Darnton's selection handles both with
academic savvy and discretion, while following a bottom-up
organization more often seen in Annales social histories.
Darnton's piece is both morbidly fascinating and intellectually
stimulating, and digs into such arcane, interesting matters as the
internal rituals of the journeymen's chapel.  By providing layers
of context to amplify Contat's anecdote, Darnton overcomes the
reader's initial outrage over the cruelty in the story, and
demonstrates that the reader can get the joke, and thereby come to
understand the actors' historical and cultural context.
jason carr
NOTES



<1>This type of hilarity and mockery is still common in the
United States military culture, and may serve to remind the
apprentice of their ignorance in the presence of their elders. 
"Newbies" or "boots" (new soldiers wearing new boots)  are, for
example, often sent on errands to retrieve muffler bearings and
cable stretchers and are helpfully informed when they have
"dropped their pockets."
http://www.mousetrap.net/~mouse/uta/