The Laughing Executioners: Deciphering the Great Cat Massacre

 

🐈 The Laughing Executioners: Deciphering the Great Cat Massacre

The 1730s in Paris saw a bizarre and violent episode: a ritualistic massacre of cats by printing shop apprentices.¹ This event, far from being a random act of cruelty, became the focus of Robert Darnton's seminal 1984 essay, "The Great Cat Massacre," which used an anthropological lens to unlock the cultural and social codes of 18th-century French workers.²

Decoding a Cultural Text

Darnton's groundbreaking contribution lies in his treatment of the event as a cultural text. His central question was: Why was this incident, recounted with enormous hilarity by the perpetrators, funny to them? By seeking the answer, he illuminated the worldview of the lower classes, a perspective often lost in formal history.

1. The Event: Frustrated by long hours, poor food, and contempt from their master and his wife, printing apprentices staged a mock trial and brutal execution of local cats, including the wife’s beloved pet, la grise.

2. The Context: The masters and their pampered pets symbolized the arbitrary power and privilege of the elite. Meanwhile, the apprentices lived under precarious conditions, often sleeping in cold workshops and fearing the influence of their superiors.

3. The Symbolism: The cat, particularly the black cat (or the grey one in this case), was deeply associated with witchcraft, the Devil, and illicit sex in popular French folklore. By subjecting the cats to a formal trial and painful execution, the apprentices were symbolically enacting a witch-hunt against their master's wife, a figure they despised and feared as an abusive figure with "magical" control over their lives.

The cat massacre was thus a subversive, cathartic ritual of social inversion.³ It was a safe way for the workers to express the violence and resentment they felt toward authority through licensed misrule, drawing upon the traditions of Carnival where the social order was temporarily turned upside down.

The Importance of Darnton's Work 🧠

Darnton's article is foundational to cultural history and is widely taught in anthropology because of its methodology.⁴ It demonstrates how seemingly irrational or bizarre events can become perfectly rational and meaningful when decoded using the internal logic of the culture that produced them. It shifted historical focus from the grand narratives of political elites to the popular beliefs and mentalités (worldviews) of the common people.

Applying the Lesson: COVID-19 Social Distancing as a Cultural Text

Darnton's "Cat Massacre" teaches us that extreme, sudden societal changes often reveal underlying cultural tensions and create new rituals of inversion. We can apply this lens to the recent mandatory social distancing during the COVID-19 pandemic:

• The Event: The imposition of universal spatial barriers (2 meters/6 feet), the required wearing of masks, and the closure of public social spaces.

• The Experience: For many, the compliance with social distancing was a necessary act of collective responsibility and public virtue—a shared "ritual" to defeat an invisible enemy. However, for others, it became a symbol of government overreach, loss of liberty, and distrust of official narratives.

• The Myth/Subversion: The cat massacre was subversive laughter at the master's authority. During the pandemic, the non-compliant (those who mocked masks or gathered secretly) were the symbolic equivalents. Their defiance was a ritualistic act of social inversion against the "moral masters" (scientists, government, compliant citizens) who had enforced a new, restrictive social order. The anti-masker, like the apprentice, was expressing deep-seated distrust of authority and a desire to reclaim agency through a defiant, though dangerous, act of transgression.

By using Darnton’s methodology, we see that COVID-19 social distancing was not just a public health policy, but a cultural "text" that highlighted and amplified existing tensions between freedom and authority, individual choice and collective responsibility.