THE GREAT CAT MASSACRE 

Cats are noble and proud creatures. Well, they weren't always. Not so long ago, maybe four or five centuries ago, they were the centre of everyday cruelty and abuse by early modern men, especially of the newly aroused working class. I found the following, very enlightening paragraphes in an interesting book, and I wanted to share them with you. Without going into too much detail, let us wind back a few hundred years and marvel at how much times have changed.

Folklorists have made historians familiar with the ceremonial cycles that marked off the calender for early modern man. The most important of these was the cycle of carnival and Lent, a period of revelry followed by a period of abstinence. During carnival the common people suspended the normal rules of behaviour and ceremoniously reversed the social order or turned it upside down in riotous procession. ... Carnival was high season for hilarity, sexuality, and youth run riot - a time when young people tested social boundaries by limited outbursts of deviance, before being reassimilated in the world of order, submission and Lentine seriousness. (Sounds a lot like chaos days to me, Ed.) ... Cats played an important part in some charivaris (stage shows or burlesque rituals marking highpoints of carnival, Ed.) In Burgundy, the crowd incorporated cat torture into its rough music. While mocking a cuckold or some other victim, the youth passed aroudn a cat, tearing its fur to make it howl. "Faire le chat", thy called it. The Germans called charivaris "Katzenmusik", a term that may have been derived from the howls of tortured cats

Cats also figured in the cycle of Saint John the Baptist, which took place on June 24, at the time of summer solstice. Crowds made bonfires, jumped over them, danced around them, and threw into them objects with magical power, hoping to avoid diseaster and obtain good fortune during the rest of the year. A favorite object was cats - cats tied up in bags, cats suspended from ropes, or cats burned at stake. Parisians liked to incinerate cats by the sackful, while the Courimauds (or "cour à miaud" or cat chasers) of Saint Chamond preferred to chase a flaming cat through the streets. In parts of Burgundy and Lorraine the danced around a kind of burning May pole with a cat tied to it. In the Metz region they burned a dozen cats at a time in a basket on top of a bonfire. The ceremony took place with great pomp in Metz itself, until it was abolished in 1765. ... Although the practice varied from place to place, the ingredients were everywhere the same: a "feu de joie" (bonfire), cats, and an aura of hilarious witch-hunting.

The torture of animals, especially cats, was a popular amusement throughout early modern Europe. You have only to look at Hogarth's "Stages of cruelty" to see its importance, and once you start looking you see people torturing animals everywhere. Cat killings provided a common theme in literature, from "Don Quixote" in early seventeenth-century Spain to "Germinal" in late nineteenth-century France. Far from being a sadistic fantasy on the part of a few half-crazed authors, the literary versions of cruelty to animals expressed a deep current of popular culture... All sorts of ethnographic reports confirm that view. On the "dimanche des brandons" in Semur, for example, children used to attach cats to poles and roast them over bonfires. In the "jeu du chat" at the Fete-Dieu in Aix-en-Provence, they threw cats high in the air and smashed them on the ground. They used expressions like "patient as a cat whose claws are being pulled out" or "patient as a cat whose paws are being grilled". The English were just as cruel. During the Reformation in London, a Protestant crowd shaved a cat to look like a priest, dressed it in mock vestments, and hanged it on the gallows at Cheapside. It would be possible to string out many other examples, but the point should be clear: there was nothing unusual about this ritual killing of cats.

First and foremost, cats suggested witchcraft. ... To protect yourself from sorcery by cats there was one, classic remedy: maim it. Cut its tail, clip its ears, smash one of its legs, tear or burn its fur, and you would break its malevolent power. ... They figured in as staple ingredients in all kinds of folk medicine aside from witches' brews. To recover from a bad fall, you sucked the blood out of a freshly amputated tail of a tomcat. To cure yourself from pneumonia, you drank blood from a cat's ear in red wine. To get over colic, you mixed your wine with cat excrement. You could even make yourself invisible, at least in Brittany, by eating the brain of a newly killed cat, provided is was still hot. 

And why do the call these the dark ages? With all those cats lighting the streets? But seriously, and remembering the teenage geek I overheard today, who said "I am a fantasy-fan" and "I'd like to live in medieval times". Go ahead, frogface. Now think about your nearest leftwing-pc-fanatic-greenpeace-supporter-animal-rights-activist in that times... Smiling, aren't you?

(excerpts taken from “The great cat massacre and other episodes in French cultural history” by Robert Darnton; Penguin Press. The guy also holds university-classes on the subject. Studying can be fun!)