For centuries in the villages of southwestern France and northern Spain, there was a group of people who looked like everyone else, spoke the same language, prayed to the same God and were still treated as if they carried some invisible curse. These were the Cagots: forced to live in segregated hamlets, made to use separate church doors and fonts, banned from touching public water or marrying “normal” neighbors, and branded with symbols like a goose’s foot, even though no one could agree on what was supposedly wrong with them or where they had come from in the first place.
Over hundreds of years, myths piled up, were they lepers, heretics, Goths, Saracens, cursed builders?, but modern research suggests they weren’t racially or physically different at all, just victims of a prejudice so deep that by the time the French Revolution finally broke their legal chains, many Cagot families chose to erase their own identity to survive, leaving behind one of Europe’s strangest outcast histories: a hated “caste” with no clear origin story and almost no trace.
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