La Gran Matanza De Gatos Y Otros Episodios En La Historia De La Cultura Francesa (spanish Edition)

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. Peasants Tell Tales: The Meaning Of Mother Goose -- Workers Revolt: The Great Cat Massacre Of The Rue Saint-séverin -- A Bourgeois Puts His World In Order: The City As A Text -- A Police Inspector Sorts His Files: The Anatomy Of The Republic Of Letters -- Philosophers Trim The Tree Of Knowledge: The Epistemological Strategy Of The Encyclopédie -- Readers Respond To Rousseau: The Fabrication Of Romantic Sensitivity. Robert Darnton. Includes Bibliographical References And Index. In this dazzling series of essays, Robert Darnton exhumes the strange and wonderful world views of the ordinary and extraordinary people inhabiting the cities, towns, and countryside of France in what we like to call "The Age of Enlightenment."