The Last Untouchable in Europe

This article is from YEARS ago. And yet, I've never told it in full before, and not with pictures. And it is QUITE the story. "Enjoy"

An old domestic door in the Basque Country. The sunflowers are to ward off evil

The Last Untouchable in Europe

Sitting in her suburban living room in Tarbes, in southern France, is Marie Pierre Manet-Beauzac. With her wistful smile, neat dark hair, and politely friendly children, she could be Madame Everywoman.

And yet in her background, and her genes, is a truly extraordinary tale of a hidden holocaust: the tale of a cursed and unique race, finally erased from history, in supposedly civilised France, within living memory.

Few people have heard this tale; it is one of the concealed and startling horrors of European history; I’ve only discovered it during deep research for a novel. But here, on this quiet summer afternoon, Marie wants to tell me the true story of her people. I can only hope my book will do justice to her remarkable confessions.

So who is Marie? She is a Cagot. That means she is maybe the last of a breed of European “untouchables” who were cruelly abused for at least a thousand years, mainly in the Pyrenees, but also in neighbouring regions - such as Aquitaine, the Basque Navarre, and along the western French coast, up to Brittany.

These outcasts, the Cagots, were thought to be “different” in the most horrible ways.

Most people thought they were stupid, diseased, and given to criminality. Others claimed they were bisexual, and that they had black magic powers. Wild rumours talked of them emitting enough pungent bodyheat to shrivel an apple merely by clutching it, some said their veins ran with green blood – blood which oozed from their bellybuttons on Good Friday.

Cagots were supposed to have strange heads, webbed feet, and misshapen ears (“Cagot ear” is a medical term still used today: indicating ears without lobes). The fiercer rumours went beyond sickliness and deformation: allegations of psychosis, murder, and even cannibalism were not unknown.

Unsurprisingly such a wretched and “infectious” people were shunned. Many prohibitions were enacted so that the Cagots could be avoided by the ”pure people” - the ordinary French peasantry.

But why were they so mistreated? And mistrusted? Even today the answers to these questions are shrouded in eerie silence. And one of the reasons is guilt: the Cagots themselves, the survivors of the persecutions, have opted to remain hidden, to assimilate and outmarry and to change their names, thus to escape their pariah status.

Moreover, modern French society prefers not to discuss the abuse heaped upon Marie’s ancestors. The Cagots are like a terrible memory, buried in the French psyche, repressed, denied, ignored.

The cloudy Pyrenees of Cagot-land (I had to drive over these to go meet Marie)

Of course, France is not alone in harbouring a strange outcast race. Japan still has a class of people called the Burakumin: these untouchables are condemned to the lowest jobs and the dirtiest slums. The peculiar Melungeons of America’s Appalachian mountains are a similar example, likewise the incestuous Matignons Blancs of Guadeloupe, or the beautiful Basters, or “Bastards”, of Namibia.

It is an unhappy truth: scapegoated tribes, peoples and communities can be found across the world. Yet the savagery inflicted on the Cagots is unusually cruel, and especially mysterious.

This is why Marie is so important. As maybe the last Cagot in France – or maybe the last Cagot willing to admit her bizarre "racial identity" – Marie Pierre has been tracing her family tree, and she is willing to go on the record. And she has some compelling insights.

Staring nervously at the carpet of her living room, she tells me how her own investigations began.

‘When I first had children, I wanted, like many mothers and fathers, to know where we all came from. That meant knowing more about where I come from. And so I started researching, I traced my family tree back through the generations – through many villages in the Pyrenees.

‘And that’s when I noticed certain names and trades in my background, lots of carpenters, basket-makers, ropemakers, all of them humble people who lived in the “wrong” parts of town. Soon I realised I had this identity which was barely discussed in France – I was a Cagot.’

Marie Pierre Manet-Beauzac

Marie outlines the few known facts about the Cagots. As a people they first emerge from the mists of antiquity, in legal documents dating from about 1000AD. By the 13^th century the records show they were already regarded as a deeply inferior caste: the "untouchables" of western France.

From medieval times through to the 19^th century, the Cagots – also knows as Agotes, Gahets, Capets, and Caqueux, etc – were divided from the general peasantry in several ways. Most importantly, they had their own reserved urban districts: usually on the malarial side of the river, far away from the village centres, a safe distance from markets, taverns and shops.

These dismal ghettoes were known as Cagoteries; traces of them can still be found in remote Pyrenean communities such as Campan or Arizkun.

But the Cagots were not completely isolated from French life. They were allowed, for instance, to enter markets on certain days – usually Mondays – so the normal people would know when to stay indoors, to avoid the polluted outcasts. But if they chose the wrong day to go trading they would be brutally punished – beaten and flogged back to their ghettoes.

Even when they were allowed into the towns, Cagots had to obey fierce rules. They were not allowed to walk in the middle of the street. If they encountered a normal person, they had to shrink to the side of the road, and stand quiet and silent in the gutters.

Cagots were also forbidden to go barefoot (as the taint of their skin might infect the pure people). Similarly they were not allowed to touch the parapets of bridges. Eating or bathing with normal people was totally verboten. In an uncanny reminder of Nazi treatment of the Jews, Cagots had to wear a symbol pinned to their chest, a red or yellow goose’s foot, either real, or made of cloth (the foot symbolised their own “webbed toes”). They were also forbidden from carrying knives or other weapons, and they were forced to wear hoods, to hide their faces.

As Marie says, the most poignant bigotry occurred in the churches. ‘The Cagots were devoutly Christian, yet the Catholic church treated them with contempt. In the church buildings, they had to use their own fonts, and their own doors,’ (at least 60 Pyrenean churches still boast "Cagot" entrances). ‘These doors were usually set low, so the Cagots were forced to stoop as they entered, emphasising their lowly status’.

Marie continues ‘When the priest gave communion he went to the special Cagot pews - and he would throw the holy bread to them like they were dogs.’ Kinder priests used a long wooden spoon, so they could carefully hand out the communion wafer, without touching the accursed outcasts.

Cagot livelihoods were likewise marked by apartheid. The pariahs were forbidden to join most trades. So they made barrels for wine, and coffins for the dead. They also became expert roofers and carpenters: ironically they built many of the Pyrenean churches from which they were partly excluded.

Marie-Pierre sighs. ‘Marriage between Cagots and non-Cagots was, of course, almost impossible.’ Nonetheless, love affairs across the divide did occur – there are melancholy songs from the 16th and 17th centuries, lamenting these tragic misalliances.

The bigotry was often enforced with true cruelty: in the early 18th century a prosperous Cagot in the Landes was caught using the font reserved for non-Cagots – his hand was briskly chopped off and nailed to the church door. Another Cagot who dared to farm the wrong fields had his feet pierced with hot iron spikes. In Lourdes, any Cagot who broke the rules had two strips of flesh – weighing precisely two ounces each – ripped from each side of his spine.

Marie adds: ‘If there was any crime in a village the Cagot was usually blamed. Some were burned at the stake.’ Even in death, the discriminations persisted – the Cagots were buried in their own humble cemeteries on the chilly northern side of the church; there is still one in Bentayou-Sérée, a tiny village in the vicinity of Pau.

A “Cagot door”, southwest France

It is an extraordinary tale. So who were the Cagots, racially? Does their ancestry explain their status?

The Cagots’ provenance is opaque, partly because the Cagots have deliberately disappeared from view. Following the French Revolution, the laws against Cagots were formally abandoned – around the same time, plenty of Cagots pillaged local archives and destroyed official records of their polluted ancestry. After 1789, many emigrated, to escape the ongoing hatred and abuse of Cagots, which persisted in the countryside.

Nevertheless, there are historical accounts that afford an intriguing if bewildering glimpse of Cagot origins. Contemporary sources describe them as being short, dark and stocky. Confusingly, some others saw them as blonde and blue eyed. Francisque Michel's Histoire des races maudites (“History of the cursed races”, 1847), was one of the first studies. He found Cagots had "frizzy brown hair". He also found at least 10,000 Cagots still scattered across Gascony and Navarre, and still suffering repression – nearly 70 years after the Cagot caste was "abolished".

Since Michel's pioneering work, various historians have tried to solve the Cagot mystery. One theory is that they were lepers, or “contagious cretins”. That would explain the rules against Cagots "touching" anything used by non-Cagots. However, this theory falls down on the many contemporary descriptions of the Cagots being perfectly healthy and strong, even handsome. And Cagot skeletons, when unearthed, show none of the bone-lesions associated with lepers.

Another idea, as Marie-Pierre remarks, is that the Cagots were slaves of the Goths who inundated France in the Dark Ages. From here, etymologists have deduced that "ca-got" comes from "cani Gothi" – "dogs of the Goths". But that idea fails to explain the many variants of the Cagot name, nor does it quite square with the geographical distribution. The word “Cagot” may simply derive from “cack”, or “caca” – a basic term of abuse.

Recently, a new theory has emerged, propounded by the British writer Graham Robb. In his book The Discovery of France, Robb suggests that the Cagots were originally a guild of skilled medieval woodworkers; in this light, the bigotry against them was commercial rivalry, which became fossilised and regimented over time. He says the geographic spread is explained by Cagot workers congregating in places associated with the St James pilgrim routes, where there was plenty of work for coopers and roofers.

This unusual theory is not without evidence: one of the places most redolent of Cagot life is the town of Hagetmau, in the Landes. The Hagetmau quarter of the Cagots, the cagoterie, was only knocked down in 2004: an extraordinary survival. Even today, Hagetmau is known for its furniture making; surely a remnant of the Cagots’ specialisation in carpentry.

Marie-Pierre herself has no doubts where she comes from: ‘I believe the Cagots are descendants of dark Moorish soldiers, left over from the 8th century Muslim invasion of Spain and France, who interbred with the locals, maybe the Basques.’ It is certainly true that the Basques are known, like the Cagots, for having unusual earlobes. ‘This is why,’ she adds, ‘some people called us ”Saracens”. You can see that I am quite dark myself, and my daughter Sylvia is the darkest in her class.’

Her theory, of the Cagots being partly descended from Muslims, is supported by several French experts: because it neatly explains the religious disapproval of the Cagots. And the idea that they are a crossbreed chimes with the fate of those other outcast groups: the Melungeons, Basters, and Matignons Blancs are also mixed race tribes. Perhaps the human psyche harbours a deep and instinctive aversion to all such “irregular” people. Neither black nor white, red nor yellow: unplaceable, eerie, untrustworthy.

Marie-Pierre shows me a website, and points to a list of villages associated with “Les Agotes”.

‘Some like to say Cagots have entirely disappeared. But this is not true. If you travel near Savin or Luz Saint Sauveur, for instance, you can still see the short, swarthy people descended from the Cagots. The pestiferous people.’

I ask Marie-Pierre if she will let me take a picture of her daughter Sylvia. She shakes her head. ‘I'm sorry, but no. It is OK for me to admit where I come from. But if people knew about my children's background... it might be difficult for them. She gazes out of the window, at the distant green Pyrenees. ‘Even now there is a shame in being Cagot. Even now, the hatred lingers...’

Offering my thanks, I pocket my notebook and climb in my hire car, and drive south. The road snakes through the verdant foothills, deep into the misty Pyrenean valleys.

I stop at the isolated village of Campan. Marie has told me that Campan has a powerful sense of Cagot history, even today.

She is not wrong. The sudden mountain mist rolls down from the Pyrenees, cold and dank and biting. The church – built by the Cagots – looms grey and melancholy in the fog. I cross the little Cagot bridge over the river Adour, into the untouchables’ quarter, the semi ruined cagoterie.

A hunched figure at the end of the road, wearing a hooded raincoat, turns and glances at me. Then the figure quickly disappears into the drifting mist. Like a frightened and hooded pariah, fleeing the hatred of the world.

The church of Campan, in the foothills of the Pyrenees of southwest France. “The land of the Cagots”