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Basic Books

Great Cat Massacre: And Other Episodes in French Cultural History

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Title: Great Cat Massacre: And Other Episodes in French Cultural History
Author: Robert Darnton
ISBN: 9780465012749
Publisher: Basic Books
Published: 2009
Binding: Paperback
Language: English
Condition: New
New from the publisher

European History 1563307

Publisher Description:
The landmark history of France and French culture in the eighteenth-century, a winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize
When the apprentices of a Paris printing shop in the 1730s held a series of mock trials and then hanged all the cats they could lay their hands on, why did they find it so hilariously funny that they choked with laughter when they reenacted it in pantomime some twenty times?

Why in the eighteenth-century version of Little Red Riding Hood did the wolf eat the child at the end?

What did the anonymous townsman of Montpelier have in mind when he kept an exhaustive dossier on all the activities of his native city?
These are some of the provocative questions the distinguished Harvard historian Robert Darnton answers The Great Cat Massacre, a kaleidoscopic view of European culture during in what we like to call "The Age of Enlightenment." A classic of European history, it is an essential starting point for understanding Enlightenment France.