Reseña de The great cat massacre por Josh

Fine but not for me.

I bought this book because I thought it would be a collection of weird stories about weird French people doing weird stuff. The title suggests this. Instead it turned out to be a serious academic book.

A lot of the book is dedicated to questions of historical methodology. Darnton argues for adapting the techniques and intellectual methods of Cultural Anthropology to the study of history. To demonstrate this technique he applies it to 18th France.

In the title incident, a group of apprentices resented that their master and his wife treated their cats better than them. So one of the apprentices spent several nights sitting outside the master's window imitating cats screaming. Eventually the master couldn't stand it anymore and ordered the apprentices to round up and kill all of the cats in the area. They rounded up the cats, held a 'trial' in which the cats were accused of witchcraft, and (after finding them guilty) hanged them. The apprentices found this hilarious, though to modern readers it comes off as more psychotic and cruel.

Darnton's discusses the event to defamiliarize the reader. Foreign times and places often often seem familiar in many way until we encounter something that simply doesn't make sense. Jokes are a frequent source of this because they tend to be closely intertwined with local cultural beliefs, values, etc. Danton's claim is that if we want to understand what it was like to be a French apprentice - their mentalité - then we need to try to"get the joke" - that is understand why apprentices found killing a bunch of cats so funny.

So, he proceeds to dissect and explain the joke. Turns out it was a political statement with a lot of symbolism and whatnot. The book proceeds in this manner, with each chapter focused on explaining what it was like to be a French person in certain circumstances in the 1700s.

I found the first five chapters mildly interesting but too overloaded with theory for my liking. But the final chapter, on the public reception of Rousseau was fantastic and should be assigned alongside Rousseau's works in college classes.

Rousseau's most famous work in his lifetime was Julie; or The New Heloise. Darnton reckons this to have been the best selling novel in France prior to the revolution and Rousseau to have been the country's most famous and popular writer.

Today the novel is little read, and Darnton admits that to modern readers it's a slog: 700 pages of teenage angst with little in the way of plot. But, to French readers c. 1761 this was Harry Potter, The DaVinci Code and Twilight all rolled up in one.

At the time it was considered disreputable for a respected intellectual like Rousseau to publish a novel, much less a cloyingly romantic novel that seemed targeted at frivolous female readers. Many would simply have published under a pseudonym. But Rousseau took a different tact. He credits himself only as the book's editor, insisting that the letters were really written by Julie and her tutor. He asks the reader to forgive their immaturity and sentimentality on account of their tender age.

The book prompted an outpouring of letters to Rousseau by readers who wanted to express what a deep impact it had on them. Some also demanded to know what happened to various characters after the novel ended. Readers couldn't put the novel down, they wept when (spoiler) Julie died. Rousseau boasted that he'd received so many declarations of love from from women who had read the novel that there wasn't a single high society lady in France who would not have slept with him if he wanted.

Julie wasn't just popular with the ladies though. Napoleon lovel the book, and Arthur Schopenhauer claimed it was one of the greatest novels ever written.

Rousseau's celebrity also, I reckon, goes a decent way towards explaining the style of his more purely philosophical works. The Social Contract begins with the memorable line "Man is born free, but everywhere he is in chains." Compare that to Locke's far more ponderous opener to his first Treatise on Government, "Slavery is so vile and miserable an estate of man, and so directly opposite to the generous temper and courage of our nation; that it is hardly to be conceived, that an Englishman, much less a gentleman, should plead for it." Or the equally long winded openings of most philosophical texts (then and now).

A big part of the reason, I think, is that Rousseau was writing to be read by regular people, not just gentlemen or intellectuals. He loathed intellectual elite of the Académie Française, and everything they represented. As a result, he was bolder, more willing to piss people off or risk being dismissed by intellectuals.

There are echos of Rousseau in Marx's popular writing (c.f. "Workingmen of all countries, unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains. You have a world to win.") One key difference, perhaps, is that in Rousseau's time the chains were quite often literal, or at least represented differe