The Great Cat Massacre: And Other Episodes in French Cultural History (Penguin Classic History S.) - Softcover

"* 'A brilliant work of popular history' - NEWSWEEK * 'Authoritative... elegant and searching' - DAILY TELEGRAPH * 'A rich and splendid book' - Marghanita Laski"

Believing that historians should adopt anthropological methods in order to understand 'the otherness' of previous eras, Robert Darnton analyses a rich variety of sources, from grim peasant folklore to Enlightenment philosophy, in order to show not merely what men and women thought, but why they thought it. The result is a startling and provocative evocation of a country where young printers could riotously massacre cats, where a royal inspector of police could labour over intimate, up-to-date files on writers and where the gaudy panoply of a city could symbolize so clearly the infrastructure of a society ridden with nuance and contradiction.