The Monkey and The Cat - Meaning and Use

Meaning and Use

La Fontaine applies the fable to statecraft,

No more are the princes, by flattery paid

For furnishing help in a different trade,

And burning their fingers to bring

More power to some mightier king,

and was later followed in this by political cartoonists. One English example, dating from 1766 and titled "The Cat's Paw", satirises a political alliance of the time and represents the Earl of Bute as a monkey, using the paw of the feline Earl of Chatham to extract chestnuts from a fire. Use of the idiom at this date is one of the earliest examples in English. A later caricature from 1804 and titled "The monkey and the cat’s paw, a fable from Esop", pictures yet another simian statesman manipulating a politician to pick out the flaming chestnut of Catholic Emancipation. The cat's paw title was to be used once again in a cartoon relating to the political maneuvering that preceded the passing of the English Reform Act in 1832. In this King William IV is the cat, being coaxed by the bewigged Lord Chancellor Henry Brougham, depicted as a monkey seated at his side, to pull the hot iron of reform from a blazing fire. In this case the reference is to La Fontaine's version of the story.

In France the fable was often used to satirise the ambitious sacrificing the life of others for their own ends. The cartoon Bertrand avec Raton s'amusent à tirer les marrons du feu, dating from Napoleonic times, pictures a red uniformed monkey marshall guiding a blue-uniformed infantryman in the task. The theme reappeared in the broadside La Caricature with the title "The monkey and the cat: a military pastime". Another cartoon has a marquis urging a barefoot patriotic workman to take his place on a republican barricade, while chuckling to himself that soon the artistocratic exiles will return with their allies to impose a renewed feudalism. This too is titled "Bertrand et Raton".

The French dramatist Eugène Scribe gave the same title to his social comedy of 1833. Subtitled l'art de conspirer (the art of conspiracy), it has also been translated as 'The school for politicians' and is a reworking of a play of the same name by Louis-Benoît Picard (1805). It is ostensibly based on an episode of Danish history and concerns a bourgeois dupe caught up in political intrigue. In reality it satirises the July Revolution of 1830.

In the Netherlands the words of Vondel's Den aap en de katte were set for a cappella male chorus by Sem Dresden to celebrate the centenary of the Royal Dutch Choir in 1953. In the aftermath of World War II, the closing moral that rulers are careless of the suffering of others in fulfilling their ambition had special resonance.