The Great Cat Massacre

Notes:
The masters family believed that they had been be-witched and ordered their apprentices to rid of all the cats, they dumped sack-loads of half-dead cats into the courtyard and pronounced them guilty and read them their rights. (mental picture, so funny)
It is so funny how bad fortune is automatically related to witchcraft, seems barbarous and the opposite of the Enlightenment.
How is beating a cat half to death funny, they are helpless animals.

The two apprentices were treated so poorly and all the while they were doing all the work, letting their owner reap the benefits
Could this signify the old regime while the peasants did all of the work the middle and upper class nobles would live a lavish life free from taxes and other setbacks financially (industrialization)
Why were the workers taking their anger out on the cats, was this enjoyment of the writers interpretation?

Smaller shops were beginning to close down and larger shops with more workers and more machinery were going to bring large amounts of capital to the owners, this meant that it would be very hard to rise up in business if the you were not born into higher rank.
The idea of the monopoly is becoming more prevalent
Being born into power in the old regime has now carried over into industry(it is very hard to move social classes/moving up in business)

Cats being thrown into fires for ritual, tossed from high places to see them splatter, pulling their hair to hear them cry.
How does this equate to enjoyment?
This doesn’t seem fun but rather barbaric and im not sure if this is because I am viewing this with my moral values in comparison to those who live hundreds of years ago; however, this is a genocide of cats, how is this an anecdote?

Cats are witches in disguise and white cats are just as demonic as black ones, if you hit a cat a bruise would appear on a woman the next day, if you drank the blood of a cats ear your could cure sickness, and if you were to eat a brain of a cat that had recently died you could become invisible.
Seems that folklore had become fact due to paranoia and the lack of higher knowledge
If a cats death could bring pain and suffering to the household, is this why the two apprentices enjoyed their rampage

The bourgeois were found guilty for overworking and underfeeding his apprentices, the apprentices had made their case and won.
The storming of the prison in France is an outrage of third class people enraged with government and their non-mobile social status(contrast)
How did the apprentices mean to ridicule the legal and social order by hanging half-dead cats? Still at a lost for words, maybe im thinking to hard about it..

The killing of her cat was an attack on her sexuality; however, the family demanded the expulsion of cats
Can someone clarify what this means, I know that a cat