The cultural legacy of an ancient religious sect that was almost wiped out in the Inquisition is everywhere to be seen in the south of France - and its influence today is now more evident than Catholicism, writes Michael Foley
After a 10-month siege, the forces of the Inquisition and the King of France captured the castle of Montsegur, standing 1,208 metres high on a remote limestone peak in the Pyrenees, on March 2nd, 1244. Two hundred of the Cathar Parfaits, the heretical priests, were burned to death at the base of the peak, at a point now marked by a small monument, erected in 1960 and dedicated to those "pure Christians". The siege of Montsegur was the effective end of the Cathars. There was a further 70 to 80 years in which the Inquisition rooted out the last traces of the heresy from the little mountain villages of Languedoc but, by about 1325, it was wiped out and that really should have been that. The Cathars should have become a footnote, or perhaps a research topic for graduate history students.
Today, drive through Languedoc and you pass sign after sign announcing that you are driving through Cathar Country. Goods of every kind associated with the Cathars are sold. Washing powder is advertised as '"clean with the force of the Cathars". Craft products: wine, honey, even paté; all are sold as Cathar products. The Department of Aude has a tourism programme called "Aude, the Cathar Country" with a trademark and the promise of "quality controlled tourism". Offering high-quality cultural and traditional events, wine and food and even a "fatted poultry market (ducks and geese for foie gras)" and a Cathar country lamb festival. The fact that the true Cathar believer did not eat meat does not deter the marketeers.
Catharism, or Albigensianism (after the town of Albi), was a medieval dualist religion that originated in south-eastern Europe, before appearing in Languedoc in the second half of the 12th century, when holy men started to preach in marketplaces throughout the region. The preachers spoke of light and dark, of good and evil, and of God and Satan. God created the world of the spirit, a metaphysical and ethereal world from which mankind had been banished to languish in the material world of decay and darkness that was created by Satan. The Cathars had an antipathy to the human body and all matter. After the Fall, they believed, souls were clad in a skin by the devil, so that in every human body was a soul that belonged to God. The Cathar clergy were those who had received the Consolation, the only Cathar sacrament. Without the Consolation, the soul travelled, via reincarnation, from one body to another - be it man or animal - until it found that of a Good Christian, the Cathars' name for themselves. Following the Consolation that soul was then liberated from the world of matter.
The clergy or Perfects, lived simple lives, preaching, working as weavers, potters or similar, and applying the Consolation.
They did not eat anything produced by intercourse, which was simply producing new skins for tormented souls, so lived on bread, water and fish. It would appear that ordinary believers could eat as they wished and at the end receive the Consolation; but once the dying person had received the Consolation, they had to refrain from eating and drinking anything but water.
This was good news for those about to die, but if received too early there would follow what was, in effect, a hunger strike to the death.
So why did the church and the temporal powers find this heresy so dangerous? Just think about the subversion implicit in such beliefs for medieval man. If the temporal world was created by the devil, then none of the institutions built upon it had any authority, including the Church. If the world of grace consisted of tormented souls that moved from one body to the next in search of the Consolation, then there was no difference between a lord and a peasant or a Jew, a Muslim or a Catholic. Cathars even had women Perfects.
It was the subversion inherent in Catharism that led to Pope Innocent III calling for a crusade against it in 1208. Simon de Montfort was its temporal leader, who, with his Knights, swooped down from the north and attacked cities and towns with a degree of ferocity unknown even in those violent times. The Cistercians lent their spiritual weight to the project. When, at the sack of Beziers in 1209, the head of the Cisterians, Arnold Amaury, was asked how the Crusaders would be able to tell the Catholics from the Cathars, he is reputed to have said, "Kill them all; God will know his own". The Crusaders did just that. They killed all 20,000 inhabitants. One writer described the event as "the Guernica of the middle ages". Today a plaque commemorates, "La Grande Boucherie".
The crusade lasted until 1229, and was followed by a further 15 years of repression in which the King of France, coupled with the Inquisition, which was founded in 1233 to deal with the Cathars, laid waste the country. The cities of Béziers, Carcassonne, Toulouse, Albi, Minerve and others were all attacked. Knights from the north were given land and titles in the south, and Languedoc became part of the French crown, and part of France for the first time. The Cathar Perfects retreated to isolated and stunningly beautiful mountain castles such as Monsegur.
So, have the present day tourism authorities and marketing people simply hijacked a sad episode in Languedoc history for the heritage industry, reducing it to fake medievalism for tourists and visitors to places such as Carcasonne, with its Inquisition and torture museums? Well, yes and no. The Cathars were hijacked long before the Department of Aude dreamt up the marketing concept of "Cathar Country". The Cathars have been used to justify everything from the Reformation to revolution and even Nazism by one particular writer. Montsegur, some still maintain, is the site of the Holy Grail.
The people of Languedoc are proud of their Cathar heritage. The Cathars now symbolise the independence, democratic spirit and most important of all, separateness, of Languedoc. The name Languedoc simply means the language of Oc, or where "oc" rather than "oui", as in French, meant "yes". With the language, Occitan, the people of the south have something to use against centralised France. They are no longer simply the poor region of France, eating bean stew and speaking a form of French that Parisians find so funny, they are the inheritors of something special. Without the crusade against the Cathars, Languedoc might never have been part of France. Every Hotel de Ville flying the flag, bearing the Cathar Cross beside the French flag and the EU flag, is announcing the separateness of the south.
Occitan regionalism and the Cathars are now intertwined. In the little village of Puisserguier, near Béziers, with its château visited by few tourists, the street sign announces Plan Del Cathare, in Occitan. No one knows of the Cathar connection to this village, but everyone is sure there is one. One might see, for example, a sign for Place de L'Eglise in French and underneath it, Plan Del Carthare, Place of the Cathar.
It is as if there is a parallel history. When Northerners laugh at the "g" sound at the ends of words, that makes "vin" sounds like "veng" and "demain" like "demeng" the people of Languedoc do not mind. That, they say, is the sound of Occitan, the language spoken by the Cathars, coming through. In some ways it is as if the Cathars were never beaten.