The strange story of the Cagots

A painful affair

Towards the end of the reign of Louis XIV, in 1706, in Lialores, a small hamlet north of Condom in the Gers department, Laurent and Julie Arboucan experienced a tragedy that was all too common at the time: their daughter Marie had just died.

They prepared to give her a Christian burial, but when the child's remains arrived at the cemetery, an angry and threatening mob barred them from entering. There was no way they were going to allow Marie to be buried in the same earth as the other inhabitants of the parish.

Such a refusal from grieving parents may come as a shock, but at the time the reaction of the villagers was hardly surprising.

Indeed, Marie and her parents belong to a despised population still remembered under the name of "cagots". In many towns in the south-west of France, these people, though perfectly Christian and settled for generations, are the object of a deep-rooted, stubborn and uncompromising ostracism.

Yet the only thing that differentiates cagots from the rest of the population is their physical appearance. They are small without being dwarfs, and have deformed hands. It's true that you can recognize a cagot at a glance.

However, in 1683, the royal authorities promulgated an ordinance to put an end to this xenophobia, but alas, nobody wants to hear about it, and obscurantism is still omnipresent deep in the south-western countryside.

However, Laurent Arboucan is determined to fight for his daughter, and takes his case to court. A long and painful case begins.

An ostracism that goes back to the dawn of time

It wasn't until 1710 that the Bordeaux parliament, the region's judicial body, imposed Marie's burial in the Lialores cemetery, but when Laurent Arboucan died in his turn, his remains suffered the same fate, and the poor man once again had to appeal to the courts to be laid to rest beside his daughter.

This sad affair illustrates the condition of the cagots since this period.

Since the 10th century, Cagotes families have been ordered to live apart from the village. Objects of deep disgust, they are the subject of many unfounded beliefs: they are repulsively filthy, their breath is foul, and some even accuse them of practicing occult disciplines akin to black magic.

We avoid talking to them or touching them as much as possible, and even claim that drinking from the same glass as a cagot is fatal.

Strategies exist to counter the ill fate they carry, and rulings by the Parliament of Navarre require them to wear a mark of infamy, a red goose foot sewn onto their left shoulder, reminiscent of a much more recent and infamous star.

In some towns, cagots had to announce themselves with a rattle like lepers, and were forbidden to go barefoot to avoid contaminating the ground.

Of course, cagots only form unions with each other, and are assigned to specific professions, often involving wood or stone.

However, they are recognized as Christians and have the right to go to church, but a door and a stoup are reserved for them, as the clergy has always shown them a certain amount of support. However, they only receive the ostia at the end of a pole, as the population refuses to allow the priest to contaminate his fingers.

So where does such deep-seated rejection come from?

Many historians have studied the subject, and some of their hypotheses are quite surprising.

The name Cagot is a kind of generic term. In some regions, they were called Agotes, Colibères or Jésites.

This last name comes directly from Gehazi, a biblical character: the prophet Elisha having cured a Syrian prince of leprosy, his servant Gehazi wanted to profit from the cure and demanded money from the miraculous man. When Elisée found out, he condemned him and all his descendants to suffer from leprosy.

It is assumed that they are descendants of lepers who, like themselves, were forced to live in isolation. Marrying among themselves, these lepers would have had descendants who, over the centuries, would have kept the stigma of the disease without actually carrying it, as well as physical degeneration due to consanguinity.

But this is just one medical hypothesis to explain the Cagots' physical appearance. There are other possible explanations based on ethnic-religious assumptions.

There is an enduring hypothesis that cagot was formed by the contraction of ca-nes-goth into ca-goth and then cagots through patois phonetic deformations, as Gothic populations driven south by the Franks took refuge in large numbers in the interior and at the foot of the Pyrenees. Along the way, these groups of Goths were given insulting names by the local inhabitants.

Other more or less far-fetched clues have also had their moment of glory, but in the end, it has to be said that nobody really knows where the cagots come from.

The last cagots

Their situation would evolve, but it would take the fate of a man under Louis XVI, Bernard Dufresne, the son of a Frenchman and a cagote, who would rise in the circles of power until he was appointed Director of the Treasury by Louis XVI.

The last recorded cagots date back to 1962: a sister and her two brothers, the Dannes family in St Jean-de-Luz.

The Dannes family

Claude Boyer

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