The Discovery of France

by Graham Robb

  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 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 the late nineteenth century, and the curiously wide spread of cagots over culturally and geographically distinct regions is reminiscent of the trans-national networks of itinerant apprentices. A semi-nomadic, alien population known for its mysterious skills and which employed local forest-dwellers would certainly have been perceived as a threat. Something of this unease can still be seen on lonely sections of the Compostela route in Roussillon, in villages with no willing interest in the outside world, where signs forbidding ‘Camping sauvage’ compete with signs advertising the ‘Routes de Saint Jacques’. Pilgrims and other strangers are watched from windows and encouraged to keep moving by the free-range village dogs.

  The problem with any theory is that the distribution of cagots is not primarily a population pattern but the footprint of a prejudice. The fact that the cagot zone of the south-west so closely follows the historical borders of Gascony suggests that official tolerance of the prejudice played a bigger role in determining the distribution of cagots than the movements of a particular group of people.

  The only certainty is that cagots were identified as a separate group and forced to live in cheerless hamlets and suburbs. Nearly everything that is known about them relates to persecution. There is very little information on their lives and practices, though they do appear to have had a strong collective identity. A group of cagots in Toulousein 1600 called for their
blood to be examined to prove that they were just like other people. When the Revolution came, cagots stormed municipal buildings to destroy their birth records. Unfortunately, local memory was enough to keep the tradition alive. Some very long rhyming songs preserved the names of cagots for future generations as effectively as a bureaucrat’s card index.

  An autobiographical song written in Basque by a young cagot shepherd-poet in 1783 suggests a long apprenticeship in the ironies of persecution. His sweetheart, a shepherdess, ‘her beautiful eyes full of tears’, has come to tell him that her father has moved her to a different pasture. Someone has told the family that her fiancé is an ‘agot’ (Basque for ‘cagot’). In this part of the song, the girl is the first to speak:

  ‘Jentetan den ederrena ümen dü zü agota:

  Bilho holli, larrü churi eta begi ñabarra.

  Nik ikhusi artzaiñetan zü zira ederrena:

  Eder izateko aments agot izan behar da?’

  ‘So’ izü nuntik ezagützen dien zuiñ den agota:

  Lehen sua egiten zaio hari beharriala;

  Bata handiago dizü, eta aldiz bestia

  Biribil et’orotarik bilhoz üngüratia.’

  ‘Hori hala balimbada haietarik etzira,

  Ezi zure beharriak alkhar üdüri dira.

  Agot denak chipiago badü beharri bata,

  Aitari erranen diot biak bardin tüzüla.’

  ‘The agot, they say, is the handsomest of men;

  Fair hair, white skin and eyes of blue.

  You are the handsomest shepherd I know:

  In order to be handsome, must one be an agot?’

  ‘By this can you recognize an agot:

  First look for clues in the ear;

  He has one ear too large, and the other

  Is round and covered all over with hair.’

  ‘If that is so, you are not one of those folk,

  For your ears are a perfect match.

  If agots always have one ear too small,

  I’ll tell my father that yours are both alike.’

  *

  A PERSECUTED TRIBE that wanted to destroy its own tribal identity was not a relic of a barbarian age. The mysterious cagots were modern French citizens, harbingers of a state in which justice would be stronger than tradition. One day, as the end of the song suggests, economic development would eradicate the difference: ‘If, like you, I had been rich, your father would not have said that I was a cagot.’

  Even so, tribal identities would prove remarkably immune to legislation, wealth and passing time. They survived industrialization, migration to cities and even, in some parts, half a century of television and autoroutes. The Welche community along the ridge of the Vosges, whose Romance dialect once formed a linguistic island in a Germanic sea, still operates a clan system to find employment for the young and to prevent the community from flowing away into the Alsatian plain. The watery suburbs of Saint-Omer are still inhabited by descendants of the Hautponnais and Lyselar. Even the caste of cagots seems to be unconsciously perpetuating itself. Tracing their lineage from legal documents, an anthropologist has recently discovered that families descended from cagots still tend to intermarry and practise the same traditional trades, though they have never heard of cagots.

  It would take something more powerful than political will to forge this swarming continent of microscopic kingdoms into a single nation. Discrimination was the life-blood of tribal France. But it was also one of the means by which the modern nation would consolidate its identity. When François Marlin happened upon a large pariah community in the city of Metz in 1780, he could not have known that he was looking into the distant future:

  They have been piled up here in a little street where they are locked up each night like convicts in a jail. So that they can be told apart from other people, these wretches are forced to wear a black coat and white bands. They can also be recognized by their beards and by the air of reproof that is imprinted on their faces, not by the crime they are supposed to have committed, but by the degraded state in which they live.

  Beyond the Rhineland, the Jewish population of France was tiny and, in some départements, non-existent. Yet the Dreyfus Affair woulddivide the nation as effectively as the Virgin of Roquecezière divided one Aveyron village from another.

  In the absence of a Jewish population, and in regions where cagots were unknown, one of the commonest terms of tribal abuse was ‘Saracen’. It was applied to dozens of different groups, from the Pas-de- Calais to the Loire Valley and the Auvergne, and from the tip of the Gironde peninsula to the Alps of Savoy. The Burhin and Chizerot tribes on either bank of the Saône in Burgundy were thought to be Saracen because they were short and dark and because they treated illnesses with a special form of ‘oriental’ massage. (Reports that they wore turbans and Turkish trousers and swore by Allah are not entirely reliable.) The dark-eyed, dark-haired people of the spacious Val d’Ajol near Plombières-les-Bains were also said to be Saracen. One of the clans was famous for treating broken bones and dislocated limbs. Their children were sometimes seen on doorsteps, playing with dismantled skeletons.

  Arab colonies along the eighth-century invasion routes may have contributed physical features, words and even skills to the local population, but when all the ‘Saracen’ tribes of France are plotted on a map, it becomes apparent that they existed almost everywhere except where one would expect to find a strong Arab influence.

  Local identity consisted ultimately, not in ethnic origins, but in the fact that a community happened to be where it was rather than somewhere else. On this local level, the river of history is a sluggish stream full of counter-currents and hidden chasms. In the summer of 2004, rock faces on the road that climbs steeply out of the Val d’Ajol to the north were covered with political posters urging a population once thought to be Saracen to say ‘Non à l’Islamisation de la France’. For some of its inhabitants, tribal France is still a dangerous, divided land.

  4

  O Òc Sí Bai Ya Win Oui Oyi Awè Jo Ja Oua

  ON THE SIXTEENTH DAY of Prairial in Year II of the ‘one and indivisible’ French Republic (4 June 1794), the representative of the Loir-et-Cher département was making his way to the National Convention through a city that was being torn apart by something worse than tribal war. On that day, Citizen Robespierre was to be elected President of the Convention. For the next seven weeks, France would be governed by the guillotine. But the Abbé Henri Grégoire had more serious matters on his mind. Four years before, he had sent a questionnaire to town halls all over France on the subject of patois. (‘Patois’ was the derogatory term for dialects other than the official state idiom in its standard form. According to the Encyclopédie, it meant ‘Corrupt language as spoken in almost all the provinces. . . . “Language” proper is spoken only in the capital.’) The key questions were these: Did the people of the region have their own patois? Could it be used to express intellectual concepts or was it riddled with obscenities and oaths? Were the country people patriotic? and, most importantly of all, How could their patois be destroyed?

  The Abbé Grégoire was not a linguistic terrorist. He had campaigned for the abolition of slavery and the death penalty; he called for Jews to be given full citizenship and tried to save national treasures from revolutionary ‘vandalism’ (the word ‘vandalism’ was his invention). He wanted to cover the country with libraries and schools, but none of this would be possible, he believed, without a common tongue. Without a national language, there could be no nation.

  Grégoire himself came from a poor family in Lorraine. He knewthat an ignorant, divided population was easily exploited. To his ears, patois was the voice of superstition and subservience. As a fellow revolutionary put it, linguistic diversity was ‘one of the sturdiest flying-buttresses of despotism’. The government had already spent a small fortune having its decrees translated into Catalan, Basque, Breton, Provençal and Alsatian, but the only lasting solution, in Grégoire’s mind, was to silence those ancient tongues for good.
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  Replies to the questionnaire had straggled in from representatives, mayors, lawyers, clerics and a semi-literate farmer from Brittany. From some regions – Picardy, the centre of France, much of the Auvergne and most of Brittany – there was no response, either because no one had the necessary information or because no one cared about the incomprehensible jabbering of peasants. But there was enough to give the Abbé Grégoire a clearer view of the fragmented nation than anyone before.

  The Abbé Grégoire’s report on ‘The Necessity and Means of Exterminating Patois and Universalizing the Use of the French Language’ painted an alarming picture of a land that was still festering in medieval ignorance. The fringes of France were already known to be dominated by languages quite different from French: Basque, Breton, Flemish and Alsatian. But the two Romanic languages that covered most of the country – French in the north, Occitan in the south – also turned out to be a muddle of incomprehensible dialects. In many parts, the dialect changed at the village boundary. Several respondents claimed that differences were perceptible at a distance of one league (less than three miles) and sometimes just a few feet, as the writer from Périgueux explained: ‘The patois’s reign ends at the river Nizonne. It is amazing to cross this little stream and to hear an entirely different patois, which sounds more like French.’ In the Jura, there were ‘almost as many different patois as there are villages’. Even plants and stars had their own local names, as if each little region lived under a different sky.