In France, the date retained by modern historians (see Darton, 2009) is 1765: that year, the wife of the Maréchal of Armentières, the officer who commanded the province of the Trois-Evêchés, in Eastern France, obtained the abolition of the cat-burning ritual in the city of Metz. Each year, during the Saint John's Fires festival, on the eve of the Feast Day of Saint John the Baptist - the catholic celebration of the summer solstice - a basket containing a dozen cats was set on fire very ceremoniously by the town dignitaries. By the mid-1700s, Metz seems to have been the last town in France where such an event took place, though less spectacular cat-burning ceremonies may have still existed elsewhere (the ritual in Saint-Chamond required a single cat on a pole, for instance). The date of 1765 is likely deduced from the Histoire de Metz written by Dominican priests Dom Jean François and Dom Nicolas Tabouillot, published in 1769, where they said that the practice was abolished "two years before". François, the cat-loving activist, was happy to see the practice gone:
If some clever man were to make a history of human foolishness, (and it would be a long history) he would certainly not forget either the public fires or the burning cats in Metz. Is it possible that such bizarre ceremonies have come down to our days, that the police tolerate them, that men in authority attend them in a body, & that with an air of gravity? [...] Wouldn't it be better to leave the cats alone, & give some poor families the wood that is being burned for nothing?
For some time, the tide had been slowly turning in favour of cats. Louis XV, Marie Leczinka, and a few other nobles at the court, were cat-lovers, and the King abolished the cat-burning at the Saint-Jean in Paris (where bags of cats were burned). In 1727, François-Augustin Paradis de Moncrif, an influent courtier and reader of the Queen, published a Histoire des chats, which was both an erudite history of cats (written as a series of letters) and a very "enlightened" defense of them. In one of the letters, Moncrif denounced the cat-burning in Metz, that he called "a shame for the spirit". He also included a selection of poems about cats, and concluded his book as follows:
We shall one day see the merit of cats generally recognised. It is impossible that in a nation as enlightened as ours, prejudice in this respect should still long prevail over such reasonable sentiment. [...] Reason will have to destroy the use of prejudice, and reason's progress is not rapid; from the leniency it shows to men when it leads them, it seems that it fears to make them realise that it is it that is leading them; this is very humiliating for humanity and very contrary to the interests of cats.
The Histoire des chats was a best-seller reprinted several times, but it was also parodied and mocked, as well as his author, who ended up disavowing it.
Thirty years later, Dom François was having a hard time with the officially-condoned cat-burning that was still going on once a year in his hometown of Metz. In 1757, he published a 21-page dissertation on the topic, which was the text of a conference he gave to his fellow Messins on 22 November of that year. This was a few months after the gruesome public execution of François Damien: the performance of ultra-violence on human beings was not yet out of fashion. Page after page, Dom François took an axe to all the reasons given traditionally for the perpetuation of the cat-burning in Metz. No, burning cats was not supposed to mock the cat-loving Gypsies; no, cats were not an ancient substitute for human sacrifices; no, cats were not meant to symbolize heretics, those pesky Luther and Calvin; no, cats did not have to be burned to insult the Devil, witches and wizards. Indeed, there was no proof that the Demon took the shape of a cat (or a dog, or a goat). And let's not forget that the entire ritual was of pagan origin! François had a better explanation for the cat-burning: people were just a bunch of sadists (Sade was only 18 at the time, but he would soon acquire a reputation for debauchery):
This custom seems to come from the same source as the rejoicings and fires that are lit on this day: that is to say, it is a natural continuation of them, without there being any other reason for burning cats than the pleasure, ridiculous to be sure, but nevertheless real, that the people take in the mewing, the jumping and the various agitations that these poor beasts make to escape. People laugh at them: that is reason enough to do so.
Was Dom Jean's cat activism instrumental in getting the Maréchale d'Armentières lean on her husband to ban the cat-burning in Metz? We do not know. In any case, cats were no longer burned in France, not in such ritualized circumstances at least.
Norbert Elias used our modern revulsion toward cat-burning - that was already felt by the likes of Paradis de Moncrif, Dom François, and Madame d'Armentières - as an example of his "civilizing process":
This was not by any means really a worse spectacle than the burning of heretics, or the torturings and public executions of every kind. It only appears worse because the joy in torturing living creatures is revealed so nakedly and purposelessly, without any excuse before reason. The revulsion aroused in us by the mere report of the institution, a reaction which must be taken as "normal" for the present-day standard of affect control, demonstrates once again the longterm change of the affect-economy.
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