The Great Cat Massacre: Why Workers Found it Hilarious
18th Century Print Shop Wormers Kidnapped and Put Cats on Trial.
The Great Cat Massacre by Robert Darnton is an amazingly engaging piece of microhistory.
Darnton explored an incident in the life of Nicolas Contat, an 18th-century print-shop worker, which the worker fictionalized decades after it happened. In his story Contat (Jerome) where Léveillé worked as an apprentice in a print shop. This event “stood out as the most hilarious experience in Jerome’s entire career,” but modern audiences would find it “unfunny, if not downright repulsive” (Darnton).
Jerome thought there was nothing funnier than the time he and his fellow workers kidnapped a bunch of cats, put them on trial, and massacred them.
Darnton suggested that stark differences, such as reactions to the cat massacre, provide an entry point for an effort to “penetrate an alien culture” (Darnton).
“When you realize that you are not getting something–a joke, a proverb, a ceremony–that is particularly meaningful to the natives, you can see where to grasp a foreign system of meaning in order to unravel it.”
Readers may be appalled to learn that “the torture of animals, especially cats, was a popular amusement throughout early modern Europe” (Darnton). Many works of literature, like Don Quixote, feature scenes where cats are killed.
The Setting
The setting is pre-revolutionary France. For our cat hunters, there is no such thing as the revolution has yet to start.
Why would historians focus on this strange incident for which we have no evidence other than this print shop worker’s account? Nicolas Contat worked as an apprentice at a print shop in rue Saint Séverin in Paris in late 1730.
Contat wrote that apprentices lived challenging lives and lived in squalid conditions; they slept in a “filthy, freezing room” and found their food “especially galling.” Often, the cook would feed the cats the scrap and give the apprentices “old rotten bits of meat,” which were allegedly for cats. The print shop Master’s wife enjoyed cats; her favorite was la grise.
Jerome and Léveillé slept poorly as the cats howled and moved about. They worked long hours, and the foreman was rarely there. The Master seldom showed up “except to vent his violent temper, usually at the expense of the apprentices” (Darnton). Léveillé “resolved to right this inequitable state of affairs” by sneaking into the roof, meowing, and howling to prevent the bourgeois from sleeping (Darnton).
Before we get to the massacre, we should establish that print shop owners had developed a taste for keeping cats during this time. One such owner is said to have commissioned 25 portraits of his pets. You may be wondering why historians would investigate this.
Darnton forged a compelling narrative drawing from ethnography, folklore studies, anthropology, and historical scholarship. He uses a variety of evidence to substantiate that this is an excellent example of 18th-century print shops. He used the archives from the Société Typographique de Neuchâtel, which opened seven years after the alleged massacre. Nevertheless, it is the only “surviving record of the way masters hired, managed, and fired printers in the early modern era” (Darnton). He coupled this analysis with edicts and data regarding changes in demography, including a reduction in the number of masters, an increase in alloués, and a constant number of workers. While he admitted that these statistics are likely unreliable, they suggest certain trends that help explain why workers would find their massacring of cats funny.
Darnton used a series of documents to make inferences about working conditions. The effect of a governmental edict was to reduce the number of shop owners, increase internships, and maintain the number of workers. The print shops had lots of churn, and some workers left every few months. They even had slag that referred to quitting, emporter Saint Jean, which meant “to carry off your set of tools or quit” (Darnton).
Papers from a Swiss printing group suggest employers saw them as “lazy, flighty, dissolute, and unreliable” (Darton). According to Contat, the government had broken associations, and “the ranks had been thinned by alloués; the journeymen had been excluded from masterships: and the masters had withdrawn into a separate world of haute cuisineand grasses matinées” (Darnton).
Okay, back to Jerome and Léveillé.
Jerome and Léveillé worked under terrible conditions, and the presence of cats made their lives hell. They resorted to disturbing the owners’ sleep by pretending to be cats. After a few restless nights, the owners asked them to scare the cats away but to spare la grise.
Léveillé went for le grise and “smashed its spine with an iron bar” (Darnton). The workers killed some cats, injured others, and trapped many.
They gathered in the courtyard where they “staged a mock trial, complete with guards, a confessor, and a public executioner. After pronouncing the animals guilty and administering last rites, they string them up on improvised gallows” (Darnton).
When the lady of the house returned, she was aghast when she saw a hanged cat. They assured her la grise was unharmed. The workers had attacked the household, but their attack remained partly hidden. The wife felt assaulted and realized they could be next. Her husband arrived and was angry because of the lost labor. Contat has them both leave “in humiliation and defeat” (Darnton)
Léveillé performed reenactments of these events in a burlesque fashion. These “burlesque reenactments of incidents in the life of a shop, known as copies in printer’s slang, provided a major form of entertainment for the men” (Darnton).
Ok, this is super weird, but why cats?
Two aspects seem strange to modern audiences: the pantomime and burlesque aspect and the murder of cats.
Readers should remember that during those times, it was common to celebrate carnivals. Folklorists have shown that during these times, “common people suspended the normal rules of behavior and ceremoniously reversed the social order or turned it upside down in riotous procession” (Darton). The celebrations sometimes included a trial of a king who was then executed. Occasionally, the people used cats.
Cats have fascinated people across space and time. Darnton posited that some animals, dogs, cats, and others have notable roles historically, and cats have appeared to have “ritual value” in many places (Darnton).
These people were fascinated with cats’ torture and the sounds they made. They often called it faire le chat in France and Katzenmusik in Germany (Darnton). In their worldviews, cats were associated with mysticism, magic, and witchcraft.
For example, on June 24th, during the cycle of Saint John Baptist, people made a bonfire and threw objects into it to “avoid disaster and obtain good fortune” (Darton). One of their “favorite” objects was cats.
In these celebrations, one would see “cats tied up in bags, cats suspended from ropes, or carts burned at the stake. Parisians liked to incinerate cats by the sackful, while the Courimauds (cour à miaud or cat chasers) of Saint Chamond preferred to chase a flaming cat through the streets” (Darnton).
In a celebration known as Dimanche des brandons in Semur, “children used to attach cats to poles and roast them over bonfires” (Darton).
In Brittany, it was believed that “you could even make yourself invisible… by eating the brain of a newly killed cat, provided it was still hot” (Darnton).
Some expressions substantiate how common these practices were. For example, the expression “patient as a cat whose claws are being pulled out” or “patient as a cat whose paws are being grilled” (Darton). There is evidence that people in England similarly tortured cats and other animals.
There were likely some commonalities throughout Europe, like the connection between cats and witchcraft. Cats were, thus, perceived as dangerous, and they were thought to be powerful.
People could protect themselves by maiming them. People who knew how to use them could gain powers. For example, in Béarn, they thought burying a cat alive would clear weeds. At one place, sucking the “blood d out of a freshly amputated tail of a tomcat” was prescribed to recover from a severe fall (Darnton).
Lastly, cats were associated with sex. Fables associated them with conquering women, and there were stories about girls giving birth to a litter of kittens after eating cat stew. Cats were also associated with cuckolding.
And why kill the cats?
The most direct reason was that “the masters love cats; consequently, [the workers] hate them” (Darnton). Killing the cats, in short, hurt the print shop owners.
Second, the massacring of these cats also served as a mockery of the bourgeois, who the workers depicted as “a superstitious, priest-ridden fool–took the whole business seriously. To the apprentices, it was a joke” (Darnton). The workers outwitted them and symbolically retaliated against them.
Third, given the cat’s association with sex and cuckold, the killing of le grise served as another insult. In short, the workers symbolically accused the Master’s wife of being a witch, “the double joke would not be lost on anyone who could read the traditional language of gesture” (Darnton).
The massacre was meaningful to the workers. Darnton wrote:
“So the workers tried the bourgeois in absentia, using a symbol that would let their meaning show through without being explicit enough to justify retaliation. They tried and hanged the cats. It would be going too far to hang la grise under the Master’s nose after being ordered to spare it; but they made the favorite pet of the house their first victim, and in doing so, they knew they were attacking the house itself, in accordance with the traditions of cat lore.”
How Do Historians Learn From Such Accounts?
The only way we know anything about this alleged massacre is through the Contat account, which he wrote about twenty years after it allegedly occurred. Other than this account, there is no evidence that cats were massacred. However, whether it happened or not may be irrelevant. What matters is how historical actors ascribed meaning. Darnton recognized that the account may be a “meaningful fabrication.” Thus, this piece challenged the historian’s usual choice of subject in some ways by focusing on an event that may not have happened.
Darnton argued that the account is Contat’s “attempt to tell a story” and like all stories, “it assumes a certain repertory of associations and responses on the part of its audience, and it provides meaningful shape to the raw stuff of experience”(Darnton).
What Can We Learn From the Great Cat Massacre?
Darnton claimed historians have difficulty understanding the lives of historical actors who left no records; these people’s lives can only be accessed by statistics and data collected by others or through how others describe them. Print shop workers were among the few artisans who were literate and thus able to produce records. Darton added, “one can only assert that the printer lived and breathed in an atmosphere of traditional customs and beliefs which permeated everything.”
The Great Cat Massacre first showed an awareness of class injustice, and the “killing of the cats” expressed a hatred for the bourgeoisie that had spread across the workers (Darnton). This view sharply contrasts with several historical accounts, often portraying the “artisanal manufacturing era as an idyllic period” (Darnton). Darnton added, “Journeymen and masters may have lived together as members of a happy family at some time somewhere in Europe, but not in the printing houses of eighteenth-century France and Switzerland” (Darnton).
A second learning is that workers rarely considered themselves a class; instead, their conceptual category was around their type of work (in this case, printers). In contrast, they claimed that the “main characteristic of the bourgeois, a superstitious religious bigot. He occupied a separate world of pharisaical bourgeois morality. The workers defined their “republic” against that world and against other journeymen’s groups” (Darnton).
Third, while Darnton held that it would be “absurd” to call this a “dress rehearsal” for the French Revolution, he stated that this “earlier outburst of violence did suggest a popular rebellion, though it remained restricted to the level of symbolism” (Darnton)
“The workers found the massacre funny because it gave them a way to turn the tables on the bourgeois. By goading him with cat calls, they provoked him to authorize the massacre of cats, then they used the massacre to put him symbolically on trial for unjust management of the shop. They also used it as a witch hunt, which provided an excuse to kill his wife’s family and to insinuate that she herself was the witch.”