Miaou!

By Otto Friedrich

THE GREAT CAT MASSACRE AND OTHER EPISODES IN FRENCH CULTURAL HISTORY

by Robert Darnton; Basic Books

298 pages; $17.95

The intriguing title is not a joke, nor is it an attempt to reach the Garfield market. It represents a searching effort to determine why a band of Parisian printers bludgeoned to death a lot of cats, notably including the master printer's wife's pet, then subjected several of the animals to a mock trial and hanged them. More important, why did these printers of the 1730s think the butchery was so comic that they guffawed as they re-enacted it in pantomime more than 20 times? Was it sadism? Mass hysteria? Demonic ritual?

The answers lie partly in the master's mistreatment of his apprentices, who were made to work long hours and fed on rotten scraps that the pet cat refused to eat. They also lie partly in the popular tradition of torturing felines, which were widely associated with both sorcery and sexuality, and which were often burned on religious holidays. But why did the printers find that funny? By "accidentally" including the pet along with the alley cats, they were not only symbolically punishing the master but symbolically accusing his wife of witchcraft and symbolically raping her. And getting away with it.

That is a sample of the rich meanings Princeton History Professor Robert Darnton finds in the commonplaces of prerevolutionary France. He is exploring a relatively new branch of history, cross-fertilized by anthropology and known in France as l'histoire des mentalites. Says Darnton: "It attempts to show not merely what people thought but how they thought -- how they construed the world."

All this somewhat speculative re-creation of the ancien regime is solidly based on Darnton's mastery of its most obscure documents. He has discovered, for example, that there was a police official who spent the years 1748 to 1753 writing more than 500 still unpublished dossiers covering virtually every writer in Paris. They included all those troublesome philosophes whose skeptical criticisms of the Bourbon monarchy contributed to its downfall, yet this diligent police analyst never used the term philosophes, never considered them as a group, never imagined that any writers could have political importance. Woe to the ruler who relies too much on police intelligence.

The whole relationship between writing and reading in these prerevolutionary years was undergoing significant changes that reached beyond politics. Darnton endeavors to demonstrate the change from the letters that a young merchant in La Rochelle wrote to the bookseller who regularly sent him the new works of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. In Darnton's view, Rousseau's preachings first established "the author as Prometheus" and his readers as emotional disciples. Darnton also finds rich social implications in folk tales like "Little Red Riding Hood."

He scorns the psychiatric interpretations of Perrault's Mother Goose because he knows the 10,000 or so 19th century transcriptions of peasant versions of these same tales.

Interpreted historically, they record the harshness and cruelty of rural life. In the peasant version, Little Red Riding Hood does not escape the wolf. Darnton's portrait of France is impressionistic, a series of sketches, but it is striking, original and often very clever. Felicitations!