Vida Parisina En 1730

“The Great Cat Massacre”

Parisian life during the 1730’s was not the chic and civilized one we think of today. In his article titled “The Great Massacre”, Robert Darnton helps us understand that during the 1730’s, Paris was made up of a predominantly superstitious population that was divided by an almost impermeable social hierarchy. Darnton’s article helps us acknowledge, how both the superstitious beliefs, and the strict social stratifications of the time, explain why a group of Parisian artisans orchestrated a gruesome mass murder of cats. In this article we are able to appreciate how the artisans of the print shop in rue St. Severin engaged in brutal hunt and murder of cats, a massacre that was an act, which was an indirect rebellion and ridicule towards their master. With their atrocity, the men exclaimed their discontent with the living conditions they had to endure as artisans, they demonstrated they had the power to rebel and insult their superiors, and their act, also highlighted the deeply rooted beliefs in witchcraft and the lack of scientific reasoning that was present at the time.

The mass murder of cats, which the artisans from the Rue St. Severin organized, was a rebellion against the unjust and unbearable living conditions they had to withstand. The artisans of 1730 Paris, constituted a part of the lower class and lacked many opportunities the middle and upper classes enjoyed. The artisans that took part in the murder of cats, “slept in a filthy freezing room, rose before dawn, ran errands all day, while dodging insults from the journey men and abuse from their master, and received nothing but slops to eat”. These wretched living conditions the artisans of the shop endured, help explain the pent up frustrations they felt with the wide social gap that deprived them from enjoying simple luxuries like sleeping more hours or eating good meals. These frustrations eventually developed into hatred towards the bourgeois as the social gap continued to grow further apart, and as their possibilities to climb the social ladder diminished. The hatred towards their masters incited the artisans of the shop to take an initiative in rebelling against him. The cat massacre was a form of protest that expressed the hatred towards the bourgeois and the injustices of the social system. “The injustice seemed especially flagrant in the case of the [artisans], who were treated like animals while the animals were promoted over their heads to the position the boys should have occupied…” By killing the cats, the artisans were able to create a great ridicule and insult towards their boss both by killing his wife’s adored cat and by staging a charivari in which they mocked and condemned him of being a cruel boss.

The cat massacre reflects the lack of scientific rationality and demarcates the strong superstitious beliefs of the time. The artisans rebelled against their master by taking advantage of his superstitious beliefs to ridicule and rebel against him. They firstly deprived him from sleep by howling like cats outside his window. The master subsequently was fooled; he thought he was being kept awake by howling cats. He then ordered his apprentices to eliminate the cats of the street because he believed, like most of the French population of the time, that “witches transformed

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