6 ms·

Cagot: a persecuted and despised minority found in the west of France

121 points by benbreen 9y ago

projectramo 9y ago
More info from a journalist with some origin theories: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1285450/The-untouchables-FRANCE-How-swarthy-Pyrenean-race-persecuted-centuries-abused-today.html http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1285450/The-untoucha...
- sitkack 9y ago
  > Japan still has a class of people called the Burakumin: these untouchables are condemned to the lowest jobs and the dirtiest slums. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burakumin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burakumin
  - jpatokal 9y ago
    Not really: they're almost entirely assimilated now thanks to social & geographic mobility. Some prejudice lingers particularly around the Kansai area, but as one example, being of buraku descent didn't stop Hashimoto from being repeatedly elected as governor and mayor of Osaka. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/T%C5%8Dru_Hashimoto https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/T%C5%8Dru_Hashimoto
    - panglott 9y ago
      I do not believe this is entirely true. Hashimoto had to change his name to hide his background, for example. Many Japanese are extremely hesitant to speak about this issue at all; it remains a very sensitive topic. There is evidence of recent employment discrimination and marriage discrimination, especially in western Japan. Japanese silence on the issue speaks volumes. https://www.japantimes.co.jp/community/2009/01/20/issues/breaking-the-silence-on-burakumin-2/ https://www.japantimes.co.jp/community/2009/01/20/issues/bre... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burakumin#Social_discrimination https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burakumin#Social_discriminatio...
      - jpatokal 9y ago
        His mother changed their family name when he was a child. He was "outed" during his first election campaign, but this did him no appreciable harm, and the media made a bigger deal of his father having apparently been a low-level Yakuza gangster. Also, it's difficult to disentangle "extremely hesitant to speak" and "genuinely unaware/doesn't care": as far as I can tell, for most Japanese, the issue is an irrelevant historical relic. Living in Tokyo for years, the only reference I ever heard or saw a single piece of train station graffiti proclaiming that a certain train station was an etamura (derogatory term for buraku village). As noted, around Osaka it's a bigger thing, but the days of employers or prospective inlaws routinely engaging detective agencies to root out any trace of buraku origin seem to be long past. (Although doubtless you could still do this if you really wanted to.) Finally, it's indeed a political issue, and often in unsavoury ways: the article you link to goes into some detail about how the Buraku Liberation League, which has... non-mainstream views on how many buraku there are and how badly they're persecuted, has Yakuza ties and earns considerable profits from government assistance projects.
        panglott 9y ago
        As far as I can tell, the fact that it remains a taboo to discuss means that it remains extremely socially salient. Some of that is the fallout of the 1960s-era denunciation campaigns, which were both seemingly effective and very painful in the context of Japanese values. Most Japanese I have talked to about this view the whole topic as extremely shameful. But with something like this, it would be useful to have some kind of positive indication that it is a historical relic, rather than just something declined to discuss anymore. But any effort to gain real demographic information is seen as a threat, because that's how buraku people were systemically blackballed in the past.
- SideburnsOfDoom 9y ago
  That's The Daily Mail, I'm not sure that "journalist" applies.
nwah1 9y ago
Fascinating, and sad.
sitkack 9y ago
> Their only distinguishing feature was their descent from families identified as Cagots.
- fvdessen 9y ago
  > Rhyming songs kept the names of Cagot families known.
  - sitkack 9y ago
    So if you could move and change your name, you would be instantly off the shit list?
    - jpatokal 9y ago
      Yes. Which is why they no longer exist.
    - vacri 9y ago
      In the time period we're talking about, what you're saying is not trivial. Hell, it's not even trivial today - look at the stereotypical 'poor white trash' guy. Scrub him up and put him in a suit, and the way he talks and behaves isn't going to make him indistinguishable at an upper-class dinner party. Or a different angle: take a modern-day American and put him in the UK. Without a lot of work, it's clear what his origin is from his speech and his customs, despite the similar cultures. Now go back 500-1000 years, where people didn't move around much (sometimes enforced by law) and most people only spoke their regional dialect. And if you were able to move town, the work you knew how to do was still the shit work for the lowest class - it's not like you could just pick up silversmithing on a lark, for example.
      - sitkack 9y ago
        A couple of MOOCs or a bootcamp and they could make 80-120k in 16 weeks.
      - munificent 9y ago
sevensor 9y ago
Interesting. Unlike the suppression of linguistic minorities (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vergonha https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vergonha), this is very local and based purely on being a member of the wrong family. It seems that even during the persecution, nobody could figure out what the Cagots were being persecuted for, other than a vague notion that they might be unclean.
GuiA 9y ago
Huh, TIL (I’m French). My mom and grandma frequently used the word “caqueux” as a pejorative when I was growing up, but I assumed it was derived from “caca” (“poop”). Makes more sense now.
- thope 9y ago
  what about "caguer" ? it sounds even closer
  - Renaud 9y ago
    Caguer is from the south-west. It's derived from he latin cacare, to shit.
akkartik 9y ago
One of my all-time favorite characters is Le Cagot from Shibumi by Trevanian. https://www.amazon.com/Shibumi-Novel-Trevanian/dp/1400098033 https://www.amazon.com/Shibumi-Novel-Trevanian/dp/1400098033 Up there with Edna from the Incredibles.
- throwawayknecht 9y ago
  Somewhat bizarrely, though, he is Basque and it's suggested he's wildly divergent genetically (though it's not clear if it's really suggesting that, or just Hel using it to rile him up - Hel is enough of a Marty Stu it's reasonable to read some authorial belief into it), neither of which is true of the Cagot.
  - akkartik 9y ago
    Yeah he's not going for accuracy with the nom de guerre. The name is part of his campaign to create a larger-than-life cartoonish character to help the Basque movement. Saying crude things is very much part of it. In that regards the choice of name may not necessarily be progressive and an attempt to identify with the Cagot. (Though I haven't read the book in 20 years.) Edit: I just remembered the Author's Note at the front of the book saying something like, "With the exception of <three people including Le Cagot>, none of the characters in this book are real -- though they may not know it." Unfortunately Google Books doesn't show that page.
hitekker 9y ago
The key paragraph: >The Cagots were not an ethnic group, nor a religious group. They spoke the same language as the people in an area and generally kept the same religion as well. Their only distinguishing feature was their descent from families identified as Cagots. Few consistent reasons were given as to why they should be hated; accusations varied from Cagots being cretins, lepers, heretics, cannibals, to simply being intrinsically evil. My take is that people generally enjoy having "punching bags". Based off this article and other instances of man's inhumanity to man, "punching bags" are people who are: 1) Outlets for existing grievances and resentments, a.k.a. scapegoats. 2) Powerless, weak, and unable to retaliate against abuse, a.k.a. victims. 3) Designed, in the minds of the abusers, for the purpose of being abused, a.k.a. inferior, subhuman etc. Through this lens, the aforementioned "reasons" are rationalizations, a facade over our collective sadism. Sure, a single tragic event may start the cycles of violence, but the reactor that powers it over generations is our built-in desire to hurt "other" people, to take pleasure in "their" misery, and, most significantly, to pretend that "we" are doing so in the interests of morality, society, etc. It feels good therefore, it must be good! Such a twisted sentiment isn't always at the forefront of our minds, but given how often we as a species and as individuals have sought to make "punching bags" out of each other, I would say shared-sadism is more sublimated than staged.
- gnarbarian 9y ago
  Now we do the same thing with political parties!
  - PhasmaFelis 9y ago
    Are you proposing that major political parties are "powerless, weak, and unable to retaliate against abuse"?
    - gnarbarian 9y ago
      I'm referring more to people's tendency to dehumanize and hate another group.
vacri 9y ago
> So pestilential was their touch considered that it was a crime for them to walk the common road barefooted or to drink from the same cup as non-Cagots. The Cagots were often restricted to the trades of carpenter, butcher, and rope-maker Not that bigotry ever made sense, but "your very touch spoils the road upon which you walk... but by all means, cut up our meat for us" is a particularly weird one.
sevensor 9y ago
I was interested by this story, so I did some more googling, but as far as I can tell there are only two sources of information about the Cagots on the internet. One is a widely copy-pasted article by the author Tom Knox promoting his book about despised peoples, and the other is the 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica (https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/1911_Encyclop%C3%A6dia_Britannica/Cagots https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/1911_Encyclop%C3%A6dia_Britan...). Might be worth following up on the books cited in the Britannica article.
- ykler 9y ago
  The French Wikipedia article has much more info than the English one.
  - sevensor 9y ago
    Thanks for the pointer! I should remember to check out the wikipedia in the local language for subjects like this.
legostormtroopr 9y ago
>The Cagots were not an ethnic group, nor a religious group. They spoke the same language as the people in an area and generally kept the same religion as well. Their only distinguishing feature was their descent from families identified as Cagots. Yet, now despite a history of abuse and segregation, descendants of the Cagots are now just seen as "privileged whites" who need to apologise for historical slights against ethnic groups their ancestors never met.
- glibgil 9y ago
  wow, you're low empathy in two directions
  - legostormtroopr 9y ago
    Care to elaborate?
- orbat 9y ago
  Your comment is based on a complete misunderstanding of what white privilege (or privilege in general) is about, and it seems to be mostly based on getting all your information about the subject from other similarly misinformed people. Nobody is saying all whites "need to apologise for historical slights against ethnic groups their ancestors never met", this is a strawman perpetrated by, again, people who have no idea what they're talking about. I'd suggest reading e.g. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/gina-crosleycorcoran/explaining-white-privilege-to-a-broke-white-person_b_5269255.html http://www.huffingtonpost.com/gina-crosleycorcoran/explainin...
  - Chris2048 9y ago
    > Nobody is saying.. Plenty people say that
    - orbat 9y ago
      So instead of actually reading the article that I linked to that explains the concept, you decided to argue semantics? I'm fine with you not wanting to educate yourself, but don't pretend your answer was somehow a good rebuttal if you didn't even bother with the actual meat of my argument

121 points by benbreen 9y ago

More info from a journalist with some origin theories: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1285450/The-untouchables-FRANCE-How-swarthy-Pyrenean-race-persecuted-centuries-abused-today.html http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1285450/The-untoucha...

sitkack 9y ago
> Japan still has a class of people called the Burakumin: these untouchables are condemned to the lowest jobs and the dirtiest slums. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burakumin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burakumin
- jpatokal 9y ago
  Not really: they're almost entirely assimilated now thanks to social & geographic mobility. Some prejudice lingers particularly around the Kansai area, but as one example, being of buraku descent didn't stop Hashimoto from being repeatedly elected as governor and mayor of Osaka. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/T%C5%8Dru_Hashimoto https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/T%C5%8Dru_Hashimoto
  - panglott 9y ago
    I do not believe this is entirely true. Hashimoto had to change his name to hide his background, for example. Many Japanese are extremely hesitant to speak about this issue at all; it remains a very sensitive topic. There is evidence of recent employment discrimination and marriage discrimination, especially in western Japan. Japanese silence on the issue speaks volumes. https://www.japantimes.co.jp/community/2009/01/20/issues/breaking-the-silence-on-burakumin-2/ https://www.japantimes.co.jp/community/2009/01/20/issues/bre... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burakumin#Social_discrimination https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burakumin#Social_discriminatio...
    - jpatokal 9y ago
      His mother changed their family name when he was a child. He was "outed" during his first election campaign, but this did him no appreciable harm, and the media made a bigger deal of his father having apparently been a low-level Yakuza gangster. Also, it's difficult to disentangle "extremely hesitant to speak" and "genuinely unaware/doesn't care": as far as I can tell, for most Japanese, the issue is an irrelevant historical relic. Living in Tokyo for years, the only reference I ever heard or saw a single piece of train station graffiti proclaiming that a certain train station was an etamura (derogatory term for buraku village). As noted, around Osaka it's a bigger thing, but the days of employers or prospective inlaws routinely engaging detective agencies to root out any trace of buraku origin seem to be long past. (Although doubtless you could still do this if you really wanted to.) Finally, it's indeed a political issue, and often in unsavoury ways: the article you link to goes into some detail about how the Buraku Liberation League, which has... non-mainstream views on how many buraku there are and how badly they're persecuted, has Yakuza ties and earns considerable profits from government assistance projects.
      - panglott 9y ago
        As far as I can tell, the fact that it remains a taboo to discuss means that it remains extremely socially salient. Some of that is the fallout of the 1960s-era denunciation campaigns, which were both seemingly effective and very painful in the context of Japanese values. Most Japanese I have talked to about this view the whole topic as extremely shameful. But with something like this, it would be useful to have some kind of positive indication that it is a historical relic, rather than just something declined to discuss anymore. But any effort to gain real demographic information is seen as a threat, because that's how buraku people were systemically blackballed in the past.
SideburnsOfDoom 9y ago
That's The Daily Mail, I'm not sure that "journalist" applies.

nwah1 9y ago

Fascinating, and sad.

sitkack 9y ago

> Their only distinguishing feature was their descent from families identified as Cagots.

fvdessen 9y ago
> Rhyming songs kept the names of Cagot families known.
- sitkack 9y ago
  So if you could move and change your name, you would be instantly off the shit list?
  - jpatokal 9y ago
    Yes. Which is why they no longer exist.
  - vacri 9y ago
    In the time period we're talking about, what you're saying is not trivial. Hell, it's not even trivial today - look at the stereotypical 'poor white trash' guy. Scrub him up and put him in a suit, and the way he talks and behaves isn't going to make him indistinguishable at an upper-class dinner party. Or a different angle: take a modern-day American and put him in the UK. Without a lot of work, it's clear what his origin is from his speech and his customs, despite the similar cultures. Now go back 500-1000 years, where people didn't move around much (sometimes enforced by law) and most people only spoke their regional dialect. And if you were able to move town, the work you knew how to do was still the shit work for the lowest class - it's not like you could just pick up silversmithing on a lark, for example.
    - sitkack 9y ago
      A couple of MOOCs or a bootcamp and they could make 80-120k in 16 weeks.
    - munificent 9y ago

sevensor 9y ago

Interesting. Unlike the suppression of linguistic minorities (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vergonha https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vergonha), this is very local and based purely on being a member of the wrong family. It seems that even during the persecution, nobody could figure out what the Cagots were being persecuted for, other than a vague notion that they might be unclean.

GuiA 9y ago

Huh, TIL (I’m French). My mom and grandma frequently used the word “caqueux” as a pejorative when I was growing up, but I assumed it was derived from “caca” (“poop”). Makes more sense now.

thope 9y ago
what about "caguer" ? it sounds even closer
- Renaud 9y ago
  Caguer is from the south-west. It's derived from he latin cacare, to shit.

akkartik 9y ago

One of my all-time favorite characters is Le Cagot from Shibumi by Trevanian. https://www.amazon.com/Shibumi-Novel-Trevanian/dp/1400098033 https://www.amazon.com/Shibumi-Novel-Trevanian/dp/1400098033 Up there with Edna from the Incredibles.

throwawayknecht 9y ago
Somewhat bizarrely, though, he is Basque and it's suggested he's wildly divergent genetically (though it's not clear if it's really suggesting that, or just Hel using it to rile him up - Hel is enough of a Marty Stu it's reasonable to read some authorial belief into it), neither of which is true of the Cagot.
- akkartik 9y ago
  Yeah he's not going for accuracy with the nom de guerre. The name is part of his campaign to create a larger-than-life cartoonish character to help the Basque movement. Saying crude things is very much part of it. In that regards the choice of name may not necessarily be progressive and an attempt to identify with the Cagot. (Though I haven't read the book in 20 years.) Edit: I just remembered the Author's Note at the front of the book saying something like, "With the exception of <three people including Le Cagot>, none of the characters in this book are real -- though they may not know it." Unfortunately Google Books doesn't show that page.

hitekker 9y ago

The key paragraph: >The Cagots were not an ethnic group, nor a religious group. They spoke the same language as the people in an area and generally kept the same religion as well. Their only distinguishing feature was their descent from families identified as Cagots. Few consistent reasons were given as to why they should be hated; accusations varied from Cagots being cretins, lepers, heretics, cannibals, to simply being intrinsically evil. My take is that people generally enjoy having "punching bags". Based off this article and other instances of man's inhumanity to man, "punching bags" are people who are: 1) Outlets for existing grievances and resentments, a.k.a. scapegoats. 2) Powerless, weak, and unable to retaliate against abuse, a.k.a. victims. 3) Designed, in the minds of the abusers, for the purpose of being abused, a.k.a. inferior, subhuman etc. Through this lens, the aforementioned "reasons" are rationalizations, a facade over our collective sadism. Sure, a single tragic event may start the cycles of violence, but the reactor that powers it over generations is our built-in desire to hurt "other" people, to take pleasure in "their" misery, and, most significantly, to pretend that "we" are doing so in the interests of morality, society, etc. It feels good therefore, it must be good! Such a twisted sentiment isn't always at the forefront of our minds, but given how often we as a species and as individuals have sought to make "punching bags" out of each other, I would say shared-sadism is more sublimated than staged.

gnarbarian 9y ago
Now we do the same thing with political parties!
- PhasmaFelis 9y ago
  Are you proposing that major political parties are "powerless, weak, and unable to retaliate against abuse"?
  - gnarbarian 9y ago
    I'm referring more to people's tendency to dehumanize and hate another group.

vacri 9y ago

> So pestilential was their touch considered that it was a crime for them to walk the common road barefooted or to drink from the same cup as non-Cagots. The Cagots were often restricted to the trades of carpenter, butcher, and rope-maker Not that bigotry ever made sense, but "your very touch spoils the road upon which you walk... but by all means, cut up our meat for us" is a particularly weird one.

sevensor 9y ago

I was interested by this story, so I did some more googling, but as far as I can tell there are only two sources of information about the Cagots on the internet. One is a widely copy-pasted article by the author Tom Knox promoting his book about despised peoples, and the other is the 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica (https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/1911_Encyclop%C3%A6dia_Britannica/Cagots https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/1911_Encyclop%C3%A6dia_Britan...). Might be worth following up on the books cited in the Britannica article.

ykler 9y ago
The French Wikipedia article has much more info than the English one.
- sevensor 9y ago
  Thanks for the pointer! I should remember to check out the wikipedia in the local language for subjects like this.

legostormtroopr 9y ago

>The Cagots were not an ethnic group, nor a religious group. They spoke the same language as the people in an area and generally kept the same religion as well. Their only distinguishing feature was their descent from families identified as Cagots. Yet, now despite a history of abuse and segregation, descendants of the Cagots are now just seen as "privileged whites" who need to apologise for historical slights against ethnic groups their ancestors never met.

glibgil 9y ago
wow, you're low empathy in two directions
- legostormtroopr 9y ago
  Care to elaborate?
orbat 9y ago
Your comment is based on a complete misunderstanding of what white privilege (or privilege in general) is about, and it seems to be mostly based on getting all your information about the subject from other similarly misinformed people. Nobody is saying all whites "need to apologise for historical slights against ethnic groups their ancestors never met", this is a strawman perpetrated by, again, people who have no idea what they're talking about. I'd suggest reading e.g. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/gina-crosleycorcoran/explaining-white-privilege-to-a-broke-white-person_b_5269255.html http://www.huffingtonpost.com/gina-crosleycorcoran/explainin...
- Chris2048 9y ago
  > Nobody is saying.. Plenty people say that
  - orbat 9y ago
    So instead of actually reading the article that I linked to that explains the concept, you decided to argue semantics? I'm fine with you not wanting to educate yourself, but don't pretend your answer was somehow a good rebuttal if you didn't even bother with the actual meat of my argument