The Wombat File Is Yours to Keep

They were restricted to carpentry and rope-making. They came into church by a separate, low door set off to one side. They couldn't marry outside of their group without dire punishments, and their social and economic life was subject to severe restriction.

Reading Graham Robb's fascinating new book The Discovery of France, one comes across the strange case of the "cagots" a minority (ethnic? It's hard to say if the term is applicable) group who were essentially a pariah caste within pre-modern France, right on up into the 19th Century.

The British novelist Elizabeth Gaskell wrote about the "Accursed Race", as did other scholars and commentators but no one seems to have completely penetrated the central mystery about the cagots: what defined them? There were thousands of people labeled as cagots, living in their own often ghetto-like communities adjacent to other towns and villages throughout the Pyrenees and southwestern France. They spoke the same dialects as their neighbors, had the same religion, and did not seem to orchestrate their lives around a deliberately separate culture. Although in many cases writers describe cagots as having distinct physical features, these accounts are contradictory and there does not seem to be an obvious correlate to conceptions of "ethnicity" as we typically understand it. Cagots looked, spoke and worshipped as their neighbors. Yet cagots were both socially and legally forbidden from attempting to become "non-cagot" - - attempts at assimilation were seen as a threat.

Various theories connect the idea of the "cagot" to a mythical belief in a community of carriers of "white leprosy" or to a putative ethnic connection with Muslim invaders of Europe. Robb himself finds more productive the suggestions in the goose-foot emblem cagots were sometimes made to wear, which have apparent links to the symbols of traveling carpenters' guilds in the early medieval period.

Whatever the origin of the group's identity - - enforced largely from without, and not a source of pride from within - - the circumstances under which they lived say a lot about the power of collective prejudice and myth. Robb's book is vastly informative and worth the read for lots of reasons, but his thoughts on the meaning of the cagots in our shared history are among the most valuable parts of the book.