A rich and splendid book! ---Marghanita Laski. A riveting portrait of French mentalités under the ancien régime. The Great Cat Massacre (1984) is the subject of a scholarly work by American historian Robert Darnton, describing and interpreting an unusual source detailing the murder or "massacre" of cats during the late 1730s by apprentice printers living and working on Rue Saint-Séverin in Paris. Darnton describes how, as the apprentices suffered hard conditions, they came to resent the favours which their masters gave to their cats, and contrived to deal with the nuisance cats by slaughtering them so as to distress their masters. Darnton interprets this as an early form of workers' protest. 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.