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Authors: Graham Robb
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venture any further into la France profonde without completely running out of information. The time has almost come to return to Paris and the relative comfort of bureaucratic control. But a sense of being lost in tribal France is an opportunity not to be missed. Anyone who avoids the main highways is likely to discover older itineraries by accident: pilgrim paths, drove roads, tiny river valleys, routes taken by saints or by their relics, arrow-straight ‘Roman roads’ that were cut across the landscape long before the Romans. Sites of no apparent interest begin to form a pattern: a place on the outskirts of a town where no one would stop unless they had to, a copse at the end of a lane that goes nowhere, the shady side of a stream or a windy patch of thorn and rubble where a cottage or a Gaulish house once stood.
It was in places such as these that one of the largest tribes of France used to live, scattered over a vast area that stretches from north-western Spain to the English Channel. This tribe will return us by an unexpected route to a more familiar world.
The earliest record of the people known as cagots dates from the year 1000. For over nine hundred years, they were found in small communities throughout the west of France under various names: ‘agotac’ in the Basque Country, ‘gahets’ or ‘gafets’ in Gascony, ‘capots’ in parts of Languedoc and Anjou, ‘caqueux’ or ‘cacous’ in Brittany. There were cagots in murky suburbs of Bordeaux and Toulouse, Rennes and Quimper, and on the edge of almost every town and village in south-western France. There were also a few isolated communities across the border in north-western Navarre.
Traces of the cagots survive today in place names, in worn stone faces carved into door lintels, and in tiny doors and fonts in about sixty churches from Biarritz to the western side of the Col de Peyresourde. Most cagot doors are found to the left of the porch: the cagots were supposed to slip into church and sit on benches along the cold north wall. 7 They were not allowed to sit with the rest of the congregation. At communion, they received the host on the end of a stick. They were forbidden to walk barefoot in public and to touch the parapet of a bridge with their bare hands. Until the seventeenth century, they paid no taxes because their money was considered unclean and they were excused military service because they were not allowed to carry arms.
The only trades that male cagots were allowed to practise were carpentry and rope-making. A trace of this enforced specialization can still be found in the town of Hagetmau, which was once the focal point of several cagot communities, where almost half the populationworks in the chair industry. Many of the women worked as midwives and were thought to know secret remedies and spells. Since the cagots were skilled carpenters, they were treated as a valuable workforce by some nobles and educated people who found the prejudice absurd. In 1681, the parliament of Rennes made it illegal to persecute anyone on the grounds that they were a cagot. This made little difference to their daily lives. In the early eighteenth century, a wealthy cagot in the Landes was seen taking water from the font for ‘clean’ people. His hand was sliced off by a soldier and nailed to the church door. In 1741, a cagot from Moumour who had dared to cultivate the soil had his feet pierced with red-hot iron spikes.
Other prejudices and persecutions came and went. The church at Navarrenx was Catholic, then Protestant, then Catholic again, but the cagot door remained. On the eve of the Revolution, some priests were still refusing to admit cagots into the body of the church or to bury them with other Christians. The curé of Lurbe forced them to use a trough as their font and tried to prosecute his elder brother for marrying a cagot girl. This was in 1788, by which time they were becoming harder to find in urban areas, though Brest still had a separate
It was in places such as these that one of the largest tribes of France used to live, scattered over a vast area that stretches from north-western Spain to the English Channel. This tribe will return us by an unexpected route to a more familiar world.
The earliest record of the people known as cagots dates from the year 1000. For over nine hundred years, they were found in small communities throughout the west of France under various names: ‘agotac’ in the Basque Country, ‘gahets’ or ‘gafets’ in Gascony, ‘capots’ in parts of Languedoc and Anjou, ‘caqueux’ or ‘cacous’ in Brittany. There were cagots in murky suburbs of Bordeaux and Toulouse, Rennes and Quimper, and on the edge of almost every town and village in south-western France. There were also a few isolated communities across the border in north-western Navarre.
Traces of the cagots survive today in place names, in worn stone faces carved into door lintels, and in tiny doors and fonts in about sixty churches from Biarritz to the western side of the Col de Peyresourde. Most cagot doors are found to the left of the porch: the cagots were supposed to slip into church and sit on benches along the cold north wall. 7 They were not allowed to sit with the rest of the congregation. At communion, they received the host on the end of a stick. They were forbidden to walk barefoot in public and to touch the parapet of a bridge with their bare hands. Until the seventeenth century, they paid no taxes because their money was considered unclean and they were excused military service because they were not allowed to carry arms.
The only trades that male cagots were allowed to practise were carpentry and rope-making. A trace of this enforced specialization can still be found in the town of Hagetmau, which was once the focal point of several cagot communities, where almost half the populationworks in the chair industry. Many of the women worked as midwives and were thought to know secret remedies and spells. Since the cagots were skilled carpenters, they were treated as a valuable workforce by some nobles and educated people who found the prejudice absurd. In 1681, the parliament of Rennes made it illegal to persecute anyone on the grounds that they were a cagot. This made little difference to their daily lives. In the early eighteenth century, a wealthy cagot in the Landes was seen taking water from the font for ‘clean’ people. His hand was sliced off by a soldier and nailed to the church door. In 1741, a cagot from Moumour who had dared to cultivate the soil had his feet pierced with red-hot iron spikes.
Other prejudices and persecutions came and went. The church at Navarrenx was Catholic, then Protestant, then Catholic again, but the cagot door remained. On the eve of the Revolution, some priests were still refusing to admit cagots into the body of the church or to bury them with other Christians. The curé of Lurbe forced them to use a trough as their font and tried to prosecute his elder brother for marrying a cagot girl. This was in 1788, by which time they were becoming harder to find in urban areas, though Brest still had a separate
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