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Updated: June 9, 2025
M. Emile Souvestre records proofs of the hatred borne to them in Brittany so recently as in eighteen hundred and thirty-five. Just lately a baker at Hennebon, having married a girl of Cagot descent, lost all his custom. The godfather and godmother of a Cagot child became Cagots themselves by the Breton laws, unless, indeed, the poor little baby died before attaining a certain number of days.
Wherefore is it that even the shadow of a Cagot, if it falls across a fountain, is held to have polluted that fountain? All this points to some dreadful taint of guilt, real or imputed, in ages far remote. How general is that sensuous dulness, that deafness of the heart, which the Scriptures attribute to human beings! "Having ears, they hear not; and, seeing, they do not understand."
One day, a half-blind Cagot stumbled and touched the censer borne before this Abbe de Lourbes. He was immediately turned out of the church, and forbidden ever to re- enter it.
When the Cagot died, he was interred apart, in a plot burying-ground on the north side of the cemetery. Under such laws and prescriptions as I have described, it is no wonder that he was generally too poor to have much property for his children to inherit; but certain descriptions of it were forfeited to the commune.
A Cagot woman having to make purchases in the town, was liable to be flogged out of it if she went to buy anything except on a Monday a day on which all other people who could, kept their houses for fear of coming in contact with the accursed race. In the Pays Basque, the prejudices and for some time the laws ran stronger against them than any which I have hitherto mentioned.
One does not know how to account for the fact, that the very brother of this bigoted abbe, the seigneur of the village, went and married a Cagot girl; but so it was, and the abbe brought a legal process against him, and had his estates taken from him, solely on account of his marriage, which reduced him to the condition of a Cagot, against whom the old law was still in force.
The families existing in the south and west of France, who are reputed to be of Cagot descent at this day, are, like their ancestors, tall, largely made, and powerful in frame; fair and ruddy in complexion, with gray-blue eyes, in which some observers see a pensive heaviness of look. Their lips are thick, but well-formed.
While the cattle of the inhabitants of the commune might wander hither and thither in search of the sweetest herbage, the deepest shade, or the coolest pool in which to stand on the hot days, and lazily switch their dappled sides, the Cagot sheep and pig had to learn imaginary bounds, beyond which if they strayed, any one might snap them up, and kill them, reserving a part of the flesh for his own use, but graciously restoring the inferior parts to their original owner.
"My dear," said Mr Cameron, smiling, "I would gladly give you fifty pounds in gold, if you could tell me." "Sir!" cried I, in great surprise. He went on, more as if he were talking to himself, or to some very learned man, than to me. "What is an Iberian? Ah, for the man who could tell us! What is a Basque? what is an Etruscan? what is a Magyar? above all, what is a Cagot?
Cagot meant the dog of a Goth; they were of supposed Gothic origin by some, and of Tartar origin by others. These people were formerly supposed to have been the descendants of lepers, or to have been the victims of leprosy themselves. From the descriptions there is a decided difference between the Cagots and the cretins. In a recent issue of Cosmos a writer describes Cagots as follows:
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