The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History

Having explored the attitudes of the peasant, the artisan, and the urban bourgeois, Darnton turns his attention to a less easily classifiable member of 18th-century French society: the intellectual. Part of the reason the intellectual doesn’t fit neatly into the social order is that the term “intellectual,” or any other corresponding label, had yet to be invented in the mid-18th century. Later in the book, Darnton explores in great detail three of the most influential writers of this era: Denis Diderot, Jean Le Rond d’Alembert, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. For now, what most interests him are the attitudes and lived experiences of relatively ordinary writers living in Paris around 1750.

To grasp these attitudes, Darnton relies on a particularly novel source: the police files of Inspector Joseph d’Hémery, a Parisian detective assigned to monitor authors in the city. Between 1748 and 1753, d’Hémery wrote reports on 501 intellectuals living in Paris, all but 67 of whom were published writers. They included some of the most celebrated writers in Western history, including the aforementioned Diderot and Rousseau, and also Voltaire—although Voltaire’s influence peaked in the previous era of Louis XIV.

From these files, Darnton stitches together a rough demographic portrait of the literary scene in Paris at mid-century.