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Authors: Graham Robb
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cagot community in 1810. Local persecution continued for generations. In the 1840s, a historian searching for the ‘cursed races’ of France and Spain found about a hundred and fifty towns and villages where people identified as cagots were living. At Borce, a cagot mayor was forced out of office in 1830; at Aramits, cagot fathers had difficulty finding good husbands for their daughters; at Dognen and Castetbon, cagots were still being buried in separate graveyards in 1847, and many other cagot cemeteries were reserved for outsiders who died in the commune . A baker at Hennebont in southern Brittany lost all his working-class customers when he married a cacouse . In 1964, a teacher in Salies-de-Béarn, where the Pyrenean foothills begin to flatten out towards the Landes, found that some families were still being mocked as descendants of cagots.
No one knows – and no one knew – why the cagots were ostracized and persecuted. Birth certificates and other legal documents identified them as cagots simply because their parents had also been cagots. Strange genetic features were reported, as late as the 1890s, and linked with events in the misty past: missing earlobes,in-growing nails, bright blue or olive eyes, yellowish skin, webbed hands and feet, baby-hair on adult heads. In the south-west, it was widely believed that their ancestors were Visigoths defeated by King Clovis in the sixth century. Their name was said to derive from the Bearnese or Latin for ‘Goth dog’, though it is more likely to be related to a word for excrement. A group of cagots who sent a petition to Pope Léon X in the sixteenth century claimed to be the descendants of Cathar heretics who were exterminated in the Albigensian crusades in the thirteenth century. But the cagots predate the Cathars and there is no sign that their religion was unorthodox. A similar theory held that they were the first Christian converts in Gaul (one of their names was ‘ chrestiens ’) and that when the rest of the country was Christianized, the old pagan prejudice survived. In some periods and places, they were confused with lepers, though leper colonies existed in France several centuries before the first known ‘cagoteries’, and early edicts mention lepers and cagots as separate categories of undesirable. 8
Nearly all the old and modern theories are unsatisfactory: Roman legionaries with leprosy who were sent to spas in Gaul, crusaders returning to France with the disease, Saracens who collaborated with Charlemagne and fled to France after the defeat at Roncevaux. It finally became apparent that the real ‘mystery of the cagots’ was the fact that they had no distinguishing features at all. They spoke whichever dialect was spoken in the region and their family names were not peculiar to the cagots. They did not, as many Bretons believed, bleed from the navel on Good Friday. The only real difference was that, after eight centuries of persecution, they tended to be more skilful and resourceful than the surrounding populations, and more likely to emigrate to America. They were feared because they were persecuted and might therefore seek revenge. Songs and sayings about the cagots never bothered to justify the prejudice:
A baig dounc la Cagoutaille!
Down with the Cagots,
Destruisiam tous lous Cagots,
Let’s destroy them all!
Destruisiam la Cagoutaille,
Let’s destroy the Cagots,
A baig dounc tous lous Cagots!
And down with them all! 9
The most promising theory about their origin is still being tested, but it may eventually provide a good explanation. Many cagot communities lay on the main pilgrim routes to Compostela. Their incidence increases as the various routes converge in the south-west. The red webbed-foot symbol that cagots were sometimes forced to wear may have been the trademark of a carpenters’ guild which became powerful during the medieval building boom on the Compostela route. The intense tribal loyalties of certain guilds are well attested until
No one knows – and no one knew – why the cagots were ostracized and persecuted. Birth certificates and other legal documents identified them as cagots simply because their parents had also been cagots. Strange genetic features were reported, as late as the 1890s, and linked with events in the misty past: missing earlobes,in-growing nails, bright blue or olive eyes, yellowish skin, webbed hands and feet, baby-hair on adult heads. In the south-west, it was widely believed that their ancestors were Visigoths defeated by King Clovis in the sixth century. Their name was said to derive from the Bearnese or Latin for ‘Goth dog’, though it is more likely to be related to a word for excrement. A group of cagots who sent a petition to Pope Léon X in the sixteenth century claimed to be the descendants of Cathar heretics who were exterminated in the Albigensian crusades in the thirteenth century. But the cagots predate the Cathars and there is no sign that their religion was unorthodox. A similar theory held that they were the first Christian converts in Gaul (one of their names was ‘ chrestiens ’) and that when the rest of the country was Christianized, the old pagan prejudice survived. In some periods and places, they were confused with lepers, though leper colonies existed in France several centuries before the first known ‘cagoteries’, and early edicts mention lepers and cagots as separate categories of undesirable. 8
Nearly all the old and modern theories are unsatisfactory: Roman legionaries with leprosy who were sent to spas in Gaul, crusaders returning to France with the disease, Saracens who collaborated with Charlemagne and fled to France after the defeat at Roncevaux. It finally became apparent that the real ‘mystery of the cagots’ was the fact that they had no distinguishing features at all. They spoke whichever dialect was spoken in the region and their family names were not peculiar to the cagots. They did not, as many Bretons believed, bleed from the navel on Good Friday. The only real difference was that, after eight centuries of persecution, they tended to be more skilful and resourceful than the surrounding populations, and more likely to emigrate to America. They were feared because they were persecuted and might therefore seek revenge. Songs and sayings about the cagots never bothered to justify the prejudice:
A baig dounc la Cagoutaille!
Down with the Cagots,
Destruisiam tous lous Cagots,
Let’s destroy them all!
Destruisiam la Cagoutaille,
Let’s destroy the Cagots,
A baig dounc tous lous Cagots!
And down with them all! 9
The most promising theory about their origin is still being tested, but it may eventually provide a good explanation. Many cagot communities lay on the main pilgrim routes to Compostela. Their incidence increases as the various routes converge in the south-west. The red webbed-foot symbol that cagots were sometimes forced to wear may have been the trademark of a carpenters’ guild which became powerful during the medieval building boom on the Compostela route. The intense tribal loyalties of certain guilds are well attested until
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