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

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Robert Darnton

Vintage Books, New York, 2009, 1983, English

Nonfiction, Art and Cultural History

ISBN: 9780394729275

From the Publisher. 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 lay their hands on, why did they find it so hilariously funny that they choked with laughter when they reenacted it in pantomime some twenty times? Why in the 18th-century version of "Little Red Riding Hood" did the wolf eat the child at the end? What did the anonymous townsman of Montpelier 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 attempts to answer in this dazzling series of essays that probe the ways of thought in what we like to call "The Age of Enlightenment."

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Barry Bergdoll

On Barry Bergdoll’s Book List

One of the great reads in recent history writing. It’s the sort of micro-history that I would love to see more of in architectural history.

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