different patterns of thought shown by French writings

Delightful, informative and entertaining readings in French culture ( )

“We constantly need to be shaken out of a false sense of familiarity with the past, to be administered doses of cultural shock.”
Darnton says that to really appreciate documents and literature from the past we should try and place ourselves in the minds of the people of the time. We should try and view the world through their eyes so that we can have a better understanding of their culture (the way things worked for them).

Darnton has written six essays (and a conclusion) on documents that throw up challenges of cultural understanding for the modern reader. He has chosen a period of French History 1697-1784: the Ancien Régime of a more feudal France, although under attack from the growing class of the bourgeoise and the more scientific ideas of the enlightenment, was still a relatively stable period: the French revolution was just around the corner (starting in 1789). Darnton claims that in some respects the documents chosen reveal an alien mentality, that goes beyond our understanding. As modern readers we need to know the context surrounding the documents and the culture of the times, otherwise we may falsely interpret them and get a twisted view of their meaning. The documents chosen are not necessarily controversial, but Darnton is able to use them to make his points, which he does in an entertaining and informative way. Many of us with modern views on animal welfare; and pet lovers to boot, would be horrified by his second essay: titled The Great Cat Massacre, depicting a ritual slaughter of cats, which of course is exactly the point.

The first essay “Peasants Tell Tales: The Meaning of Mother Goose” compares various folk tales, but here Darnton already finds himself on somewhat dodgy ground, because many of these tales were not written down until much later than when they were in circulation. However by comparing the same tale from different country’s allows the cultural historian to sift out qualities that make them peculiarly French. He is on more solid ground with Workers Revolt: ‘The Great Cat Massacre of Saint-Séverin.’ This is from a document that tells the story of Nicholas Contat a printers apprentice working in appalling conditions in Paris during late 1730’s. The ritualistic killing of cats, by particularly cruel methods was something that happened fairly regularly in many layers of society, but this is not the point of this story for an Eighteenth century French person, who would be much more concerned with a workers revolt. In a ‘Bourgeoise puts his World in Order; The City as Text,’ Darnton takes a description of Montpellier (a large town in South West France) and teases from it those points that make it curious for modern readers. ‘A Police Inspector Sorts His Files’ is an essay about a dossier left by a police inspector, whose job seemed to be to keep records of all known authors/playwrights/pamphleteers during a five year period starting from 1748. What makes the dossier particularly interesting is the police Inspectors personal comments on the authors he was ‘spying on”. The final two essays bring us to the period of the enlightenment. The first of these concerns the new ideas that can be gleaned from a study of Diderot’s Encyclopedie, however It is the second essay ‘Reader respond to Rousseau’ that provides a suitable climax to the book. From a collection of letters written by Jean Ransom: a fan of Jean-Jaques Rousseau he examines a readers response to the celebrated author. Rousseau himself was conscious of how readers should respond to his writing and so he gave them advice on how they should read his work. He wanted to be seen as some sort of divine prophet on the one hand and yet wanted readers also to suspend belief on the other. This essay also provides an insight into early fan worship.

Darnton’s book was published over forty years ago at a time when cultural history was making something of a breakthrough and is now considered an exemplar of the genre. It has as much to say about how we read as it does cultural history and because it is so well written it will be of interest to anyone who reads books for pleasure and/or for information. Valuable lessons perhaps for modern readers, when reading books from an ‘alien culture’; for example those of us who dip into science fiction of the 1950’s and struggle to get past some of the sexism and racism that can be inherent in the genre: an alien culture and it is only 60 years ago. Darnton’s conclusion raises as many questions as possible answers provided when he examines his own methods: our conception of times past is ever changing, but perhaps the cultural historian is better placed with his ability to follow his nose and trust to his sense of smell. You don’t need to know anything about French history to appreciate the ideas thrown up by these essays, you just need to enjoy reading. Great stuff and five stars. ( )

Most history of the early modern period written more than a generation ago was what Robert Darnton identifies as "top-down" history: it is the history of royalty, nobles, and the intellectual elites whose ideas largely defined the times. But this contribution, along with Natalie Zemon Davis' "The Return of Martin Guerre" and Carlo Ginzburg's "The Cheese and the Worms," is essential in introducing a more egalitarian, social, "bottom-up" history that emphasizes regular people. The book contains five chapters loosely interwoven around an attempt to carve out this special niche in historiography.

The opening chapter, "Peasants Tell Tales: The Meaning of Mother Goose" gives a close historical reading to many of the fairy tales that we remember reading with innocent delight as children. Darnton scours the interpretations of Bettelheim and Fromm, dismissing them for not paying enough attention to the historical circumstances of their construction and their telling. Little did they even realize that their readings, based on the Grimm's compilation instead of Perrault's, were bowdlerized of most of the blood, violence, and scatological humor that existed in the originals, probably because of the reading demands of a growing European moralistic bourgeois. Why are some of these seventeenth and eighteenth-century fairy tales so gory? His answer is, quite simply, that our shock is just a function of how much times have changed. These were times in which children (this is before the birth of childhood as we know it) were subjected to backbreaking dawn-to-dusk labor (reminiscent of Rumpelstiltskin); in which peasants, unable to feed another child, were forced to abandon newborns (Hansel and Gretel); and, in a peculiar demography in which one of every five Norman men re-wed after the death of his first wife, stories of stepmothers abounded (Cinderella). Once familiar with these details, the innocence we thought we knew is quickly upset. These stories were the work of imagination and whim, but Darnton does a superb job of detailing the degree to which they were very social products of social history as it was happening "on the ground."

The eponymous chapter details many aspects of the growing print culture in the Ancien Regime. Master printmakers would hire journeymen to come into their shop and learn their craft. But one day in a Paris shop, these journeymen slaughtered hundreds of cats, much to their amusement, and repeated the episode in mock trials no less than a dozen different times over the next few months. As in the chapter on fairy tales, why we no longer see this as humorous, and indeed see it as barbaric, tells us just how much, as Darnton says, the "ontological position" of the cat has changed. The journeymen were upset that younger, much less experienced workers were being brought in to perform their work for almost nothing while the masters would retire to their personal rooms and lounge, eat, sleep, and take care of their cats. In a sort of Rabelasian logic of social carnival, the journeymen saw the murder of the cats as retribution meted out for the wrongs perpetrated against them.

The book has three other chapters: one on a police inspector who keeps a personal file on French intellectuals, ensuring that their thinking never becomes too freewheeling, another with one man's, and largely one culture's, growing obsession with the work of Rousseau (why was "La Nouvelle Heloise" such a big seller, anyway?), and the somewhat less interesting "A Bourgeois Puts His World In Order: The City As Text." Each of these renders very important and insightful ideas for those readers who are as interested in the caprices of history-telling and historiography as they are the events of history themselves. ( )

Honestly, as a scholar and a University instructor, I used to believe that academic "disciplines" had become way too rigid. After reading this book, I now believe that scholars should not start blurring the disciplinary lines until they fully understand what has already been done in disciplines other than their own. This book is not bad academic work--in fact it's quite interesting--but it's clearly a history scholar trying to put together a Rubik's Cube from the fields of sociology, anthropology and literary studies--and working it right there in the public press. It's earnest, hard-working scholarship, but I still kind of feel bad for him..... ( )