By Peter Walker

When I teach the Age of Revolutions, my students and I struggle with the question of origins. We know that France’s Old Regime ended – it’s right there in the name! – so students want to put everything they learn about it in a framework of inevitably approaching revolution. Absolutist monarchy appears oppressive, irrational, and outdated, likewise the Society of Orders. Every problem with its functioning appears as a sign of its imminent collapse; every complaint or call for reform appears as longing for liberty, democracy, and modernity. At my institution, students on both Left and Right seem equally eager to identify with the unstoppable forward march of progress, equally willing to condemn the royalists, loyalists, and conservatives to the dustbin of history. The problem is not unique to the Age of Revolutions. Nor is it new. Herbert Butterfield famously criticized the teleological Whig Interpretation of History in 1931. Even he was beaten to the punch by R. J. Yeatman and W. C. Sellar’s must-read 1066 And All That (1930), a hilarious satire of triumphalist British history textbooks. But the problem is particularly acute when teaching a period that is both broadly familiar to students and framed as a great leap forward in human liberation. 

There are many problems with a view of history in which outcomes appear inevitable. This view obscures the confusion and conflict which raged in the past, making unintelligible the confusion and conflict we still experience today. It removes all contingency and complexity from causal explanation; instead the world inevitably falls into place as the past is sucked forward by the gravitational pull of the present. It is implicitly conservative, reifying today’s status quo, and suggesting that everyone throughout history was sitting around waiting for the advent of the perfection we now enjoy. I’m reminded of the Kate Beaton comic, in which a man and woman decked out in uncomfortable Victorian finery say, “I am excited for someone to invent the T-shirt!” 

I therefore spend a lot of time asking students to sympathize with the most unsympathetic characters we encounter: the self-righteous champions of royal power, the zealous defenders of religious orthodoxy, or the embattled counterrevolutionaries. I assign Joseph de Maistre on the French Revolution; Charles Inglis on the American. Students sometimes assume that I like such people and think that they were right. I do not. I’m only trying to dislodge my students’ view of the present moment as the perfected and inescapable outcome of history. 

Despite my best efforts, I always feel that I fail to communicate the concept of teleology. This is the technical term for a view of causation in which events have a purpose. This concept, and criticisms of it, constitutes one of the most important intellectual contributions that History as a discipline has to offer. But this highly specialized term is hardly a figure of everyday speech. I can stand in front of a class and announce, “we have to remember that the present was not inevitable!” but those words mean little to students when they know that the Old Regime ended with the French Revolution. The challenge is to understand the world from the perspective of someone in, say, 1785, who had no idea what the future had in store.

I found myself wondering what it would be like to teach the French Revolution to students who don’t know the end of the story, and thinking about how such a blissful but unlikely state of affairs might be achieved. This classroom exercise, which I tried in the first week of a lower-level undergraduate course on “Early Modern Europe,” is designed to do just that. I began by making a handout which described, in about three hundred words, the events made famous by Robert Darnton’s The Great Cat Massacre. A printer’s apprentice named Nicholas Contat recounts the abuse he and his fellow apprentices endured at the hands of their master and his wife, who treated them worse than the cats. One night they tricked the master by imitating screeching cats outside his bedroom window, and were given permission to get rid of the animals. Contat then describes the ensuing massacre in gory – and supposedly hilarious – detail. For Darnton, the episode is a window into the profound otherness of the past: how can a massacre of cats be funny? I am more interested in the suggestion, which Darnton teases at the end of his essay, that the events somehow prefigured the French Revolution. 

But now, the trick: there are two versions of the handout, identical except for one important difference. In one, the opening sentence reads, “In his memoirs, the printer Nicolas Contat told the following story about his time as an apprentice in Paris in the 1730s (fifty years before the outbreak of the French Revolution)”; in the other, “In his memoirs, the printer Nicolas Contat told the following story about his time as an apprentice in a large city in Europe during the early modern period.” (Emphasis added here.) 

I broke the students into small groups and gave each group one or other version of the handout. Unaware that different groups had received slightly different texts, they read my summary of the Great Cat Massacre and discussed, in their group, the following questions: “Why did the apprentices kill the cats? How important is this episode? Why might a historian be interested in it?” Having discussed these questions in small groups, the class then came together to continue the discussion. 

It quickly became clear that different groups had reached different answers. For some, the Great Cat Massacre obviously expressed the social and political conflicts that would erupt in 1789. In their view, Contat was unable to touch his master and had to transfer his resentment onto the master’s cats, but people like him would not have to wait long for an opportunity to massacre the real objects of their resentment. Other students were confused by their peers’ relentless focus on the French Revolution. For them, the Great Cat Massacre held other meanings: it expressed not only the tension between master and apprentice, but also early modern views of animals, or the intersections of class and gender identity. 

After this discussion had continued for several minutes, I revealed my deception. Neither version of the handout was “wrong,” but they provided different degrees of chronological and geographic precision. The question then became: which groups had reached more valid conclusions? The students immediately observed that those who had more information had both an advantage and a disadvantage. They were better able to situate the Great Cat Massacre in its long-term context, connecting it to events in France at the end of the century. But that was all they could see. Students who enjoyed less information could see things that their peers had missed. And what if the episode had nothing to do with the French Revolution at all, and the seemingly better-informed students had been led astray by the first sentence in my handout?

The exercise in its current form worked for a course on Early Modern Europe but would not work for one on the French Revolution specifically, as some element of surprise is necessary. If students are expecting a connection with the French Revolution, all the groups will make that connection, with or without the clues on the handout. The exercise can probably be adapted for different courses, perhaps by falsifying the information on one handout rather than minimizing it. For example, one handout might locate the events in Paris in the 1730s, and the other in Geneva in the 1830s. The ensuing discussion would have to be navigated differently, and I have not tried this myself. 

I do, however, think that the basic idea is worth sharing. Having students discuss, unknowingly, two slightly different handouts recreates ignorance and frees us from the apparent benefits of hindsight. For my “Early Modern Europe” course, this exercise became a touchstone for our subsequent class discussions. We returned to it repeatedly to illustrate how the benefit of hindsight can be distorting as well as enlightening, not just when studying the revolutions which frame the end of the period, but also earlier events such as the Reformation, and indeed the very concept of early modernity. I felt that the exercise communicated the idea that we should study the past on its own terms and try to set aside, as far as possible, our knowledge of its outcomes. Sometimes the less we know, the more we understand. 

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Peter W. Walker is an Assistant Professor of History at the University of Wyoming. He is working on a book titled The Power of Suffering: Loyalism, the Church of England, and the American Revolution.

Title Image: Illustration from Lewis Carrol’s Sylvie and Bruno, in which both cats and their teleology are discussed. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

Further Reading:

Herbert Butterfield, The Whig Interpretation of History (London: G. Bell, 1931)

Robert Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History (New York: Basic Books, 1984)

Walter Carruthers Sellar and Robert Julian Yeatman, 1066 And All That: A Memorable History of England, Comprising All the Parts you Can Remember Including One Hundred and Three Good Things, Five Bad Things and Two Genuine Dates (London: Methuen, 1930)