In the late 1730s a group of apprentices and journeymen at a Paris printing shop spent the better part of a day slaughtering scores of cats, indiscriminately and with abandon. While such a gruesome display would strike most modern observers as a horrific outrage, those who participated in the massacre and many who witnessed it found the whole scene deeply hilarious. Given Darnton’s dictum that the best way to understand a culture is to probe the incomprehensible, the great cat massacre offers a perfect example for the author to unpack.

The story is sourced from the memoir of Nicholas Contat, a printer’s apprentice at a shop located on Rue Saint-Séverin in Paris and one of the key instigators of the massacre. Given that printers were among the only members of the lower artisan class required to be literate, it is rare for such a tale of working-class mischief to exist at all, Darnton writes. The account is written using aliases, with “Jerome” standing in for Contat and “Léveillé” standing in for his best friend.

To hear Contat tell it, life for many apprentices was as full of hardship as the lives of peasants.