The Cagots: Europe's Forgotten Untouchables
The Cagots were a group of people in France and northern Spain, mostly around the Pyrenees, who were treated as outcasts for centuries. They were Catholic and looked and spoke like their neighbours, yet they had to live in separate quarters, wear a goose-foot mark on their clothes, use separate church doors and holy-water fonts, and be buried in separate cemeteries.
This documentary looks at the theories about where the Cagots came from, how the French Revolution officially ended their exclusion, how the stigma lasted for generations, and why Europe's own history of untouchability is studied so little compared with caste in India.
Chapters
0:00 Untouchables in medieval France
1:00 Who were the Cagots?
1:40 Segregated in church: separate doors and the wooden spoon
2:04 Separate cemeteries and the goose-foot mark
2:40 The laws that controlled Cagot life
3:51 Cagot carpenters and the churches of the Pyrenees
4:29 Court cases and the fight for equal rights
5:10 Where did the Cagots come from? Myths and theories
6:19 The French Revolution and the Cagots today
7:15 Why is Europe's untouchability forgotten?
Read the full essay
The Cagots: Europe's Forgotten Untouchables, with full sources.
