Free The Discovery of France by Graham Robb

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