The Cagots: The Outcasts With No Origin Story

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...