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The Great Cat Massacre

... And other episodes in French cultural history, Robert Darnton - Editora Graal.

By 1730, workers with poor working conditions in a printing shop of the rue Saint-Severin in Paris, staged a pogrom against the neighborhood cats. Why? The patrãoea mistress, the "bourgeois", loved animals, especially la grise, the cat from her. The animals disturbed the sleep of the apprentices, and sleep in precarious locations had to wake up early before the arrival of the first officers, while the bourgeois were sleeping peacefully. So they decided, as revenge, to imitate the mewing of cats on the roof of the house of the master during the night, causing his anger. That made it, who was superstitious, he believed that the trouble was the work of a Witch, and the strong meanings demonic cats, and then ordered his apprentices to kill the cats, except la grise, the cat that the mistress was so fond, that order was disobeyed, she being the first victim. But from there appear numerous questions as: why to just kill the cats, or cats that they symbolized for those workers. Darnton gives several explanations for these questions. The massacre of cats is related to the nuisance they caused to the workers, since they used to close quarters of them meowing. Moreover cats also symbolized a distancing between the bourgeois and social workers, differences that, according to reports of contact, not previously exist, and a cultural change was exactly the "mania" acquired by the masters of creating cats as Pets the while that the workers used to torture them in their traditional rites.

Cats in the early modern period, acquire different meanings. They are accused of witchcraft, to attend the sabbat of the witches, they link with the devil, and even outside that looks darker, they were viewed as mysterious beings and endowed with supernatural powers, such as curing diseases. They were also used in celebrations of the community in general and artisans, Charivari, these events was that they were tortured, they were maimed, burned, strangled and killed. Soon, there was nothing extraordinary in the killing of cats to the workers, for employers because they should be revered and treated well.

Another meaning attributed to cats, and maybe this one the main one, is their connection with sex. Expressions for the cats and the female genitalia are confused and obscenities were used as provided therein, as le chat, la chatte, le minet. In the text written by Contat, one of the printing and apprentices who writes about this episode twenty years after the fact, the cat is identified as la grise, his favorite chatte. other words, kill the cat from the lady corresponded to rape her, and thus insulting the boss with a ludicrous image: that of horn.

However, the primary relationship of the massacre of cats is that they had the will to humiliate their bosses, who were outraged with the way they were treated. This can be seen very well in the "trial" made by learners to cats. There the workers the figure projected in the animals of his master and his wife, both sentenced to be hanged.

Another question might be raised is the instability which the craftspeople were submitted, whereas during the second half of the century XVII, printers, with government help, and put out most small workshops and with it an oligarchy of masters took control of the industry, preventing former apprentices rising to the position of master. These men, the teachers were increasingly willing to employ a kind of employee might jeopardize the work of salaried workers, Allouis, who were men with no qualification used only to fulfill service . With this new feature of many conflicts graphic will appear by the fear of replacement by another employee, especially conflicts between employees and employers, the massacre of cats is an example. And not just conflicts of this nature, but the conflict of cultures, of the bourgeois and the workers.

Robert Danrton seeks to situate the common man of the eighteenth century, hitherto unfamiliar, leaving aside the line of research of the time, relying more on the cultural history of mixing her look like an anthropologist with the historian, thus becoming an "ethnographic historian" where the important thing was not knowing what the individual thought, but as he thought. He tries to understand the grace behind the massacre, and concludes that workers see the grace in the fact that this is a turning point of the game, where they is that humiliated their bosses, and best, without suffering consequences, because they did not understand the meanings behind the episode. Retrieved from

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