Rachel Singleton's 2nd Presentation: The Great Cat Massacre

For my second presentation I would like to talk about The Great Cat Massacre And Other Episodes in French Cultural History by Robert Darnton and to focus in my discussion on the first chapter of the book where Darnton studies the folktales of French peasants.

The Great Cat Massacre is a series of essays in which Darnton attempts to get a picture of pre-revolutionary French popular culture by doing anthropological research of the past-reading the words of the people, listening to the stories they loved and decoding their humor. I was immediately impressed by Darnton?s thoroughness and insight as a historical researcher in reading the first chapter, Peasants Tell Tales: The Meaning of Mother Goose. He successfully tackles a challenging and relatively unexplored topic: the meaning behind and purpose of the folktale to eighteenth century French peasants.

Unlike many other historians and scholars who have analyzed folktales, Darnton attempts to find the original tale, the version(s) of the tale that was known to the peasant. He does not try to psychoanalyze the tale to add symbolism that simply is not there and would have had no place in what the tale meant to the eighteenth century peasant. He tries, instead, to approach the tales from the perspective of a French peasant, or at least as close as he can get to it, not allowing any modern Western mores skew his understanding. Most of the original versions of what are now popular fairy tales were extremely gruesome and full of taboos. It is easy for a modern reader to judge these details based on present day conventions but Darnton emphasizes the importance of discovering how the peasant viewed this violence and what purpose the telling of these tales served for them.

Throughout the chapter he systematically examines the seventeenth and eighteenth century versions of popular French folktales and makes well informed conclusions about why peasants were so interested in these stories and the meaning behind them based on what is known about the daily life of the French peasant class. He concludes all in all that the peasant folktale reflects their shared world view and lessons on how to get through a life of hardship, death and social injustice. The tales on a whole, according to Darnton say "?that life is hard, that you had better not have any illusions about selflessness in your fellow men, that clear-headedness and quick wit are necessary to protect what little you can extract from your surroundings, and that moral nicety will get you nowhere." (pg. 61)


Below I have included a website with various versions of "Cinderella" from France, Germany, Italy, etc. as an example of how many different versions of one of these tales there are. http://www.pitt.edu/~dash/type0510a.html#jacobs