The Beast in the Boudoir

Petkeeping in Nineteenth-Century Paris

Kathleen Kete

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Year: 2023
• Print ISBN:
  9780520367708
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9780520326859
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

Kathleen Kete's wise and witty examination of petkeeping in nineteenth-century Paris provides a unique window through which to view the lives of ordinary French people. She demonstrates how that cliché of modern life, the family dog, reveals the tensions that modernity created for the Parisian bourgeoisie. Kete's study draws on a range of literary and archival sources, from dog-care books to veterinarians's records to Dumas's musings on his cat. The fad for aquariums, attitudes toward vivisection, the dread of rabies, the development of dog breeding—all are shown to reflect the ways middle-class people thought about their lives. Petkeeping, says Kete, was a way to imagine a better, more manageable version of the world—it relieved the pressures of contemporary life and improvised solutions to the intractable mesh that was post-Enlightenment France. The faithful, affectionate family dog became a counterpoint to the isolation of individualism and lack of community in urban life. By century's end, however, animals no longer represented the human condition with such potency, and even the irascible, autonomous cat had been rehabilitated into a creature of fidelity and affection. Full of fascinating details, this innovative book will contribute to the way we understand culture and the creation of class. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1994.

Many titles in the Voices Revived program are also newly available as ebooks, offered at a discounted price to support wider access to scholarly work.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• I Animal Protection in Nineteenth-Century Paris The Case of Pets
• 2 The Notion of Fidelity in a Bourgeois World
• 3 The Embourgeoisement of the Beast
• 4 Dreamworlds of the Bourgeois Interior (1) Pets and Private Life
• 5 Dreamworlds of the Bourgeois Interior (2) Domesticity and the Dog-Care Book
• 6 La Rage and the Bourgeoisie
• 7 Cats and Categorization
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index