WPC3 2 ZB0J\\WOLFPAK1\RAN_113_HP5x6X@;X@X0Í ÍX0Í Íҫx6X@;X@<6X9`("Courier 10cpiX2)1#|x% Full bibliographic reference. %Darnton, Robert. "Workers Revolt," Chap. in The Great Cat Massacre ` ` ` and Other Episodes in French Cultural History New York: Basic Books, 1984.  FIRST PART: State the author's purpose in writing the selection. What does he hope to accomplish or prove? What historical issue or controversy does the author address? What is the author's attitude about the subject matter? Robert Darnton wrote "The Great Cat Massacre" to illustrate the vast cultural gulf between presentday readers and their historical subjects. In this case, Darnton uses an anecdote of insult and violence in an 18thcentury Parisian printing shop to illustrate the mentalite of the anecdote's author and, by extension, the actors in the actual event. G SECOND PART: Describe the sources the author used. What kind of work is this: Interpretive piece that reflects on historiographical issues Survey that synthesizes the findings of other researchers based on original archival research? Describe the nature of the sources, primary and secondary GDarnton relies heavily on the firsthand 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 therefore 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 Bakhtin. 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 wideranging 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.  PART THREE: describe the contents of the selection, summarizing the args of each section and describing the evidence presented to support that arg. Conclude this section with a summary of author's main findings. Darnton is quick to point out that we do not have access to the catmassacring 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 he goes on. He makes several strafing runs, adding economic, public and guild ceremonial, religious, and sexual context to the anecdotal artifact. Darnton builds the first economically layer, 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 was hostility toward the absent and demanding masters, a tendency toward the itinerant, uncertain work schedules, and volatile afterwork carousing and violence. Journeymen were hired as an industrialstyle 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 ritualsocial. First, Darnton introduces the concept of charivaris, a "burlesque procession" accompanied by crude noisemaking ("rough music") (83). This carnivalrelated social behavior, critical also to works of Mona Ozouf and Robert Muir, provides a structure onto which ruledefining 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 these references, like 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 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.ЍThis 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." 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 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 eighteenthcentury 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 journeymanmaster 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 bottomup 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. / last name at bottom right of last page. / jason carr