In the late 1730s, down the cramped and noisy Rue Saint-Séverin in Paris, a bizarre and brutal event took place. It involved no aristocrats or revolutionaries, but a handful of printing apprentices and dozens of neighborhood cats. In a carefully orchestrated act of rebellion, the young workers rounded up every feline they could find, subjected them to a mock trial, and summarily executed them by hanging. For the apprentices, it was the most hilarious memory of their youth. For us, it’s a shocking and almost incomprehensible act of cruelty.

So why did they do it? This event, famously unearthed by historian Robert Darnton, is more than just a macabre anecdote. The “Great Cat Massacre” serves as a powerful window into the social tensions, labor relations, and cultural mindset of ordinary people in pre-revolutionary France. It reveals a world so different from our own that even the meaning of a cat could be a matter of life and death.

A Printer’s Hell on the Rue Saint-Séverin

To understand the massacre, we must first step inside the print shop. Life for an apprentice in the 18th century was notoriously difficult. Two young men at the center of our story, Nicolas Contat and Léveillé, lived and worked under the thumb of their master. They endured grueling hours, miserable pay, and a strict social hierarchy that placed them at the very bottom.

Their living conditions were abysmal. They slept in a cold, dark room and were fed disgusting table scraps—food so bad, Contat later wrote, that it would have been rejected by the household cats. This was the first insult. While the apprentices choked down putrid meat, the master and his wife doted on their own menagerie of pets. The master’s wife, in particular, had a favorite: la grise, a sleek gray cat she adored more than any human in the shop.

Adding to their misery was a nightly torment. The rooftops outside their window were a popular rendezvous for neighborhood cats. Their incessant howling and screeching—which the apprentices likened to a witches’ sabbath—robbed the exhausted young men of their precious sleep. The cats, therefore, became a potent symbol of everything wrong with their lives: the injustice of their master’s privilege, the sleepless nights, and the daily degradation they suffered.

The Riotous Plan Takes Shape

The breaking point came when the apprentices decided they could take no more. Léveillé, the ringleader, devised a cunning plan. Knowing the master and his wife were superstitious, he began spending his nights on the roof, perfecting his imitation of a desperate cat in heat. He meowed so convincingly and with such demonic energy that he terrified the master’s wife, who believed their house was being bewitched.

After several nights of this psychological warfare, the sleep-deprived and frightened couple gave in. The master ordered the apprentices to solve the cat problem. Get rid of them. All of them.

For the apprentices, this was a declaration of war they had been waiting for. They armed themselves with broom handles, iron bars, and whatever else they could find. What followed was a joyous, chaotic hunt. They swarmed through the shop and the neighborhood, bagging every cat they could find. To the horror of the master’s wife, they even captured her beloved la grise.

A Carnival of Violence

What happened next wasn’t a simple extermination; it was a ritual. The apprentices organized an elaborate mock trial. They appointed guards, a confessor, and a public executioner. The captured cats were declared guilty of heinous crimes and sentenced to death. One by one, they were strung up on specially constructed gallows while the apprentices howled with laughter.

The scene was a performance of rebellion. The apprentices were not just killing animals; they were symbolically trying and executing their masters. The mistress pleaded for them to spare la grise, but her cries were met with derision. The hanging of her favorite pet was the climax of the affair, a direct and deeply personal blow against her authority and affection.

When the master and mistress appeared, they were aghast at the bloody spectacle. But they were powerless. The apprentices had been given an order, and they were carrying it out with a terrifying, carnivalesque glee. For weeks afterward, they re-enacted the massacre, “confessing” and “hanging” cats in pantomime, much to the fury of their master.

Unpacking the Symbolism: More Than Just Cruelty

To our modern sensibilities, the event is sickening. But for the apprentices, it was funny—a joke so profound that Contat was still laughing about it decades later. To understand why, we have to decode the symbols of their world.

Labor Protest and Class Hatred

At its core, the cat massacre was a form of worker protest. Unable to strike or directly confront their master, the apprentices attacked what he owned and valued: his property. The cats, especially la grise, were extensions of the bourgeois household. By killing them, the apprentices were symbolically violating their master’s home and attacking his authority.

Charivari and the World Turned Upside Down

The mock trial was not a random act. It was a form of charivari, a traditional folk ritual where a community would publicly mock and humiliate someone who had broken social norms. By staging a trial with judges and executioners, the apprentices were turning the social order on its head. For a brief, exhilarating moment, they, the powerless, held the power of life and death. The massacre was a carnival, a moment where the rules were suspended and the oppressed could openly ridicule the powerful.

Witchcraft, Sex, and Folklore

Cats in early modern Europe were not just cute pets; they were saturated with meaning. They were strongly associated with witchcraft, darkness, and female sexuality. The nightly screeching was seen as a satanic chorus. By “exorcising” the cats, the apprentices were tapping into a deep vein of popular folklore. The attack was simultaneously aimed at the witch-like mistress, the licentious cats, and the devilish forces they believed disrupted their lives.

A Glimpse into a Lost World

The Great Cat Massacre of Paris is more than a strange and violent tale. It’s a rare glimpse into the mentalité of the common person before the age of revolutions. It shows us that resistance doesn’t always look like a formal protest with banners and slogans. It can be symbolic, ritualistic, and, to our eyes, deeply strange.

This single event illuminates the simmering resentments between workers and masters, the rich symbolic culture of the common people, and the ways in which a simple animal could become a stand-in for a whole system of oppression. On the eve of the Enlightenment, as notions of rights and reason were being debated in salons, the streets of Paris were alive with older, rougher forms of justice, played out with terrifying laughter and the bodies of cats.