“Cats also featured in the cycle of Saint John the Baptist, which took place on June 24, at the time of the summer solstice. Crowds made bonfires, jumped over them, danced around them, and threw into them objects with magical power, hoping to avoid disaster 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 the stake. Parisians liked to incinerate cats by the sackful, while the Courimauds (cour a` miaud or cat chasers) of Saint Chamond preferred to chase a flaming cat through the streets. In parts of Burgundy and Lorraine they 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. The town dignitaries arrived in procession at the Place du Grand-Sauley, lit the pyre, and a ring of riflemen from the garrison fired off volleys while the cats disappeared screaming into the flames. 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.”
Robert Darnton, explaining a few of the traditional methods of cat torture in pre-revolutionary France, in The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History
Engraving by William Hogarth, part of The Four Stages of Cruelty (1820) via
