The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History

How do French folktales most differ from German folktales? How does Darnton use these differences to approach a set of general qualities he associates with “Frenchness”?

What role does Darnton believe folktales played in the lives of peasants? Of what use are stories that seem unbound to morality and full of horrifying taboos?

Why did the apprentices and journeymen find the cat massacre so funny? Explain how Darnton peels back the layers of the event to reveal the potential humor of a joke rich with symbolism. Do you find his argument convincing?

What makes the cat massacre such an ideal case study for Darnton’s methodology? For Darnton’s purposes of examining mentalities and attitudes, does it matter if the event is embellished by Contat? Does it matter if it even occurred at all?

Why does Darnton reject the Marxist view of the bourgeoisie and the French Revolution? In turn, how does the anonymous bourgeois’s conception of himself and his place within society differ from both Marxist theory and reality itself?

How does the anonymous bourgeois’s manuscript reveal how wealth and class were far more fluid than suggested by the traditional conception of the Three Estate society? Can you find other examples in other essays that support this argument?

While d’Hémery doesn’t explicitly mention the Enlightenment, Darnton suggests that he was implicitly aware of its concepts. What evidence does Darnton present in favor of this argument? What does d’Hémery’s attitude toward these ideas say about how ordinary non-intellectuals thought about the Enlightenment in 18th-century France?

What does Darnton mean when he calls Diderot and d’Alembert’s approach an “epistemological strategy”? How does this strategy play out in the preface and diagrams of The Encyclopédie? How does this literary strategy differ from Rousseau’s?