Beastly Ambiguity: Monkey Theater in Paris, 1600–1789

This article examines live animals as symbolic media in early modern and eighteenth-century Europe. Animal performances had become a common phenomenon in European cities by the eighteenth century. Since the influential debate that Robert Darnton’s article “Workers Revolt: The Great Cat Massacre of the Rue Saint Severin” triggered in The Journal of Modern History, the extent to which historians could read accounts of such performances as anthropological “texts” and to thus decipher inherent “signs” and symbolism has remained highly controversial. Recent writing in the history of animals has questioned the validity of interpreting the presence of animals as passive stand-ins for their symbolic meaning. Rather, human-animal encounters are now seen increasingly in terms of the interspecies cooperation that made them possible in the first place. This article argues that the newer history of a shared human-animal world can be enriched by the analysis of cases of human-animal interaction that served symbolic purposes. It focuses on the history of the particularly well-documented case of live monkey performances in Paris. Between 1600 and 1789, performances of trained monkeys produced monkey stars who became famous across Europe. Monkeys could become celebrities because, as a medium, they were suited to addressing particular preoccupations of the eighteenth-century French public sphere: celebrity culture, divisions in the society of orders, and the human-animal divide. Moreover, they did so in a way that stayed just shy of censorship, allowing us to gauge more astutely the limits of public discourse during the Enlightenment.