Prefect Brun of the Ariège described the “savage and vindictive spirit” of the mountain peasant, who “shares three-quarters of his time with the bears and wolves with whom he engages [in] daily battles, and from whom he slowly catches the ferocious and disturbing character of these carnivorous animals.”
—Peter Sahlins, Forest Rites, 19941
In 2007, the French Comité Régional de la Randonnée Pédestre (Regional Committee of Walking) added a new route through the Port de Plan and the Vallée d’Aure to the seemingly endless array of themed hiking trails in the Pyrenees to commemorate “the traces of Robinson Crusoe.” Crusoe is more often associated with the tropics than the Pyrenees, and the new trail recalls a significant episode at the end of Defoe’s novel, when Crusoe returns from a visit to Lisbon in 1687 to claim a legacy relating to his Brazilian slave plantation. Accompanied by Friday and another servant, Crusoe returns overland to England via Pamplona in October to avoid the sea, only to discover that the Pyrenees have their own terrors. When Crusoe arrives in Pamplona, he discovers that the Pyrenean passes are blocked by snow. Eventually he manages to recruit a guide to take him to “the head of Languedoc” and sets out on horseback with his servants and four French travelers into the mountains.
Before leaving, their guide warns the party to be “armed sufficiently to protect ourselves from wild beasts,” and this warning proves to be prescient. Shortly before dark on their second night in the mountains, the guide is attacked by “three monstrous wolves, and after them a bear . . . and had he been before us, he would have been devoured before we could have helped him.” Friday saves the guide’s life by shooting one of the wolves, and then goes on to kill the bear. In doing so he sets off “the most dismal howling of wolves; and the noise, redoubled by the echo of the mountains, appeared to us as if there had been a prodigious number of them.”
Descending through a narrow defile, Crusoe and his companions are followed by starving wolves that have “done a great deal of mischief in the villages, where they surprised the country people, killed a great many of their sheep and horses, and some people too.” The wolf pack continues to grow until “we saw about a hundred coming on directly towards us, all in a body, and most of them in a line, as regularly as an army drawn up by experienced officers.” After keeping the animals at bay with shots and cries, Crusoe’s party retreats to a nearby wood, where they encounter the carcasses of animals and “two men, devoured by the ravenous creatures.” For the rest of the night the travelers fight off successive assaults from “troops of wolves” that “came on like devils, those behind pushing on those before.” After killing “about threescore of them,” the party finally finds safety in a nearby village, whose inhabitants are “in a terrible fright and all in arms; for it seems, the night before the wolves and some bears had broken into the village.”
Defoe may have crossed the Pyrenees himself during a business trip to Spain, though his improbable and somewhat ludicrous descriptions of this vengeful wolf army owed more to his novelistic imagination than they did to firsthand observation. His portrait of fearful Pyrenean villagers was more plausible. Wolves and bears may never have had the capacity or desire to attack passing travelers in quasi-military formations, but even in the early eighteenth century these animals were regarded by the inhabitants of the Pyrenees as a threat to their livestock and on occasion to their own lives. Yet if Pyreneans have feared and even loathed certain wild animals, they have also respected and even revered them, and depicted them in prehistoric cave paintings and in the animal carvings on the capitals of Romanesque pillars in monasteries and churches.
A number of Pyrenean villages still hold spring festivals in which locals dress up as bears and act out myths and superstitions that reach deep into the preindustrial Pyrenean past. Some of these animals have disappeared completely from the mountains yet remained part of the culture and folk memory of the Pyrenees. Other “wild” creatures, like Defoe’s wolves, have sprung entirely from the human imagination and testify to the strange, disturbing, and often touching ways in which the inhabitants of the Pyrenees have variously interpreted and explained their mountain world to themselves.
La Chasse
Ever since human beings first began to settle the Pyrenees, they have hunted animals for survival or pleasure, from the bison, rhinoceroses, lions, and mammoths shown in prehistoric cave paintings to the wolves, bears, foxes, boars, badgers, and otters depicted in Gaston Phoebus’s celebrated fourteenth-century hunting manual known as Le livre de chasse (The Book of Hunting).2 Phoebus wrote the book himself as a loving homage to “the forest paths, the heather of the countryside and the hills” that he loved, and its lavish illustrations of hunters, servants, dog trainers, and animals celebrate a pastime that he regarded as a pleasure and an obligation. For Phoebus, all lords had a duty to hunt in order to protect their tenants’ livestock from wolves, foxes, and other predators. Hunting also honed combat skills for war and promoted physical health and moral virtue, since prolonged idleness and inactivity led too easily to the “imagination of the pleasure of the flesh” and the seven deadly sins.
Phoebus’s distilled wisdom on hunting methods and techniques is infused with a deep admiration and respect for the animals that he regarded as the worthy prey for noblemen. Though he included illustrations of net and hedge traps set by poachers, Phoebus re garded such devices as essentially ignoble and reserved for “villains, peasants and other commoners in dire need of fresh meat.” Despite the persistent efforts of the French nobility to reserve hunting for themselves over the centuries, more humble members of Pyrenean society have always hunted in their own way. In the late eighteenth century, peasants burned forests to flush out bears, while entire villages participated in noisy battues—communal bear hunts—which were intended sometimes to kill bears, and sometimes simply to chase them away.
In the sixteenth century, Pyrenean hunters began using nets, sheets, and wooden paddles to catch wild wood pigeons, or palombes, during their annual migrations southward across the Pyrenees. The English historian Charles Richard Weld observed a palombière (fowling station) near Bagnères in 1859, where well-heeled spectators gathered to watch as pigeons were lured by a lookout stationed at the top of a mast into nets that were “so cunningly set, that, when the pigeons strike against them, they fall, being liberated by the pulling of a trigger, and enclose the poor birds in the meshes. Death rapidly follows, the work of old women who mercilessly kill the pigeons by biting their necks.”3
Less gory variations of la chasse au filet (net hunting) are still practiced in the Central and Western Pyrenees, in nine designated locations that are reserved for the exclusive use of locals. Each October French Basque farmers withdraw into mountain valleys and gorges, where pulley-drawn nets are set up at one end and lookouts equipped with sheets and horns at the other. For days and sometimes weeks, these hunters wait with their paddles in the high chasse cabins erected above the gorges. At the sight of the pigeons, the lookouts flap their sheets to lure the birds down, while others blow their horns to alert the paddle bearers in their cabins. As the birds fly low into the gorge, the paddle bearers blow whistles and hurl their paddles at them to alter their flight pattern, driving them into the waiting nets farther down the valley, where their necks are broken.
Despite these annual rituals, there is no shortage of wood pigeons each year. The same cannot be said of the other animals in the Pyrenees that have been hunted to extinction or had their numbers drastically reduced. When Defoe wrote Robinson Crusoe in 1719, the animal population included wolves, bears, boars, lynx, wild goats, izards, Iberian ibex, and wild sheep. In the last three hundred years many of these species have disappeared or declined dramatically. One French scholar has claimed that three thousand Pyrenean bears were killed in the three centuries leading up to 1950. In 1837, James Erskine Murray observed that “the bear is now become scarce in the Pyrenees; but what of that?—there is more honour in killing him.”4
This attitude was not uncommon in the nineteenth century, where “bagging” rare animals was often more important than conserving them. Between 1878 and 1887, the English sportsman Sir Victor Brooke obtained an annual hunting concession in what would later become the Ordesa National Park, which enabled Brooke and his successors to all but wipe out the bouquetin (Alpine ibex) population. In his breezy account of hunting expeditions across the world, Short Stalks (1893), the British hunter Edward North Buxton described his attempt to “bag” ibex and bouquetin in the Aragonese Pyrenees. For Buxton the allure of these animals was due partly to their elusiveness and inaccessibility and partly to the fact that “their aim seems to be to pass along some tiny shelf where no man can follow.”5 Four visits were required before he finally succeeded in shooting one of these animals, after enduring “tortures” sitting for hours on high rocks and hallucinating voices in the silence and solitude.
Twenty-first-century readers are unlikely to feel much sympathy for a man who boasted of shooting a three-legged izard above Gavarnie known as “the Old Soldier” because of its ability to evade the hunters and their beaters. It was partly in an attempt to halt such depredations that the Spanish government established the Ordesa National Park in 1918 as a protected area where hunting was prohibited. Similar conservation efforts have been made in other parts of the Pyrenees at various times. Despite these efforts, some species could not be saved. In the late nineteenth century the inoffensive bouquetin had already been reduced to a small redoubt around Ordesa. The bouquetin limped on until 2000, when Celia, the last surviving Capra pyrenaica, was hit by a falling branch. By the early twentieth century the wild sheep, or mouflon, had been all but eradicated from the Pyrenees. In Spain, by the late sixties wolves had been driven out of the Pyrenees following successive extermination campaigns conducted under the Franco dictatorship. By 1950 the Pyrenean bear population had been reduced to little more than two dozen. Even the various breeds of indigenous Pyrenean horse, such as the Pottok, the Mérens, and the Castillonais were hunted to near extinction before successive campaigns managed to designate them as protected species in the latter half of the twentieth century.
Hunting was not the only reason for this decline. Deforestation, road construction, the spread of towns, villages, and ski resorts, and the establishment of hundreds of walking trails all reduced the spaces where animals had once roamed freely. Conservationists may lament this decline, but Pyreneans themselves have often felt very differently. The disappearance of the mouflon was due partly to the fact that it depleted pasturelands that shepherds needed for their own sheep. As early as the fourteenth century Pyrenean hunters were rewarded with gold or gifts of food from grateful peasants when they killed wolves or bears. When Edward North Buxton shot a bear, there was “much rejoicing among the peasants over the death of this their enemy, than over a dozen ibex.” Peasants did not always rely on visiting hunters to carry out what they regarded as a form of pest control. Shepherds and farmers shot bears and wolves on their own account and beat drums, pots, and spades during the collective battues. Yet once again, the fear and loathing directed at certain animals did not necessarily preclude fascination, respect, and even admiration for them.
Ursus arctos
Of all the wild animals of the Pyrenees, the bear has always occupied a particularly ambivalent place in the Pyrenean cultural imagination. On the one hand the French depiction of bears as l’ennemi evokes the traditional shepherd’s hostility toward the animals who killed or frightened their sheep to death, yet more affectionate nicknames such as “Mâitre Martin,” “Monsieur Martin,” or simply “Lou Monsieur” have given bears quasi-human qualities. In 1848 an obituary in a Pau newspaper mourned the death of a bear from the Vallée d’Ossau known as Dominique that was believed to have reached the age of thirty when it was shot by a local hunter. In 1906 the inhabitants of Cominac, a hamlet in the Garbet Valley, used three trained bears to chase away tax collectors attempting to enact the hated 1905 Law of Separation of Church and State transferring church property to the secular authorities—an event that was subsequently celebrated in numerous postcards at the expense of the state officials.
Pyrenean bears have also been imagined as supernatural beings. Froissart tells the story of Gaston Phoebus’s bastard brother, Peter of Béarn, who killed “a wonderfully large bear in the woods near Biscay” after it had killed four of his dogs. Peter subsequently began to walk in his sleep, wearing full armor and striking out with his sword, “as if he were on the field of battle,” at the bear, which now haunted his dreams. The nineteenth-century English folklorist T.H. Hollingsworth interviewed two Basque bear trainers, who described their bear as “God’s dog, the dog of Saint Peter.” According to Hollingsworth, the bear lived with the couple in their mountain hut when they were not traveling and “they were always careful to treat him kindly and feed him well. For example, if they had not enough of fish (which they looked upon as a luxury) for themselves and the bear, the latter must be fed and satisfied first.”6 Hollingsworth’s interviewees were convinced that “the animal understands all that is said about him, and observes and comprehends any household work, trade or occupation which may be going on; and that is the reason that a bear who has lived with men should never be allowed to return to the forest and mountains, for he will tell the other bears of what he has seen and learnt, and they, being very cunning, will come down into the valleys, and by means of their great strength, added to the knowledge they have thus gained, will be able to rule men as they did [italics in the original] before!”
These itinerant bear trainers were already an occasional presence in Spain and southern France in the eighteenth century. From the early nineteenth century on, however, their numbers increased as peasants in the impoverished Ariège Pyrenees took up the profession of montreur d’ours (bear displayer) in order to make a living. After obtaining the coveted certificates identifying them as a conducteur d’animaux féroces (conductor of ferocious animals), these bear displayers traveled with their animals to circuses, fairs, and village festivals. It was in the nature of this profession that the montreur often traveled with his animal by remote paths and trails, since the smell of bears terrified local horses and livestock, and generally slept out with his animals in the open air.
The typical montreur d’ours traveled with a trumpet, a bear stick, rope chains, and a muzzle, dressed in velvet or wool trousers, and wore a beret. At Cauterets, Henry Blackburn observed a “haughty Frenchman in a waistcoat and long coat” holding a dancing bear by a chain, whose paws were attached to a stick above its shoulders, and a little monkey wearing a red beret and sash that collected the money. Blackburn was not impressed by the “mournful memory . . . of this dancing bear,” nor of his “fellow in misfortune, the monkey that took the money.”7 The training of these bears required a great deal of time, patience, and cruelty. Cubs were first taken from their mothers, who were usually killed first. At six months old they were fitted with metal muzzles that were screwed into their jawbones or metal rings put though their noses. They were then taught how to stand upright, hold a baton, perform dance steps, and do other tricks such as juggling and playing dead.
Some of these bears provided their owners with a surprisingly good living. Bear displayers from the Ariège were found across France and Europe, and even in the United States, South America, Australia, and New Zealand, where some of them found fame and fortune. Some ariégeois bear trainers, or oussaillès as they were known in the local slang, made their way through America equipped with maps of American railway lines, neck rings, and “le 48 de Liverpool”—a .48 revolver. In 1889 a montreur d’ours named Jean Souquet and another Ariegeois named Jean Icart Moumat took a bear to England and then to Glasgow, where they boarded a Siberian ship to Canada. From there Souquet and his companion continued their journey to the United States, where they performed up and down the country as “the Souquet Brothers” before reaching Honolulu, where they continued their travels to New Zealand and Australia, before Souquet returned to France.
Civilization and “Monsieur Martin”: bear, Luchon, September 1900 (Eugène Trutat, Bibliothèque Municipale de Toulouse).
Even before World War I, such journeys had become difficult if not impossible, as various countries passed laws against bear displaying. By that time the bear population in the Ariège was already so depleted that bear displayers were obliged to have their animals delivered from Central Europe to Marseilles. In 1950 Pierre de Listou, the last montreur d’ours in the Vallée d’Aspe, was killed by his own bear. In the early 1960s there were an estimated twenty-four bears left in the entire Pyrenees, and in 1996 the French government attempted to halt this decline with a reintroduction program that brought to the surface all the old ambivalance toward Monsieur Martin.
Rewilding the Pyrenees
Species depletion in the Pyrenees has not always been an irreversible process. In 1957, long before the concept of ensauvagement (“wildification”) was invented, the wild mountain sheep was brought back to the French Pyrenees. In the 1990s wolves began to return to the Pyrenees of their own accord. In 1948 the French surgeon, hunter, and mountaineer Dr. Marcel Couturier (1897–1973) introduced six marmots from the Alps into the vale of Barrada, in the Luz-Gavarnie Valley—the first time these animals had been seen in the Pyrenees since the end of the last Ice Age. Today these groundhog-like mammals can be found all around the slopes above Gavarnie and across the Pyrenees. In 2009 a joint project carried out by the Centre of Food Technology and Research in Zaragoza and the National Research Institute of Agriculture and Food extracted DNA from the last Iberian ibex, Celia, and succeeded in bringing a kid to life for seven minutes.
The reintroduction of bears was always going to be more controversial. In 1996–97, the Mitterand government successfully reintroduced three Slovenian brown bears into the mountains near the village of Melles in the Central Pyrenees. A further reintroduction program followed the shooting of Cannelle, the last indigenous female member of Ursus arctos pyrenaicus—the Pyrenean brown bear—in 2004. Two years later five more bears were introduced into the Central Pyrenees, and today there are more than twenty-two bears in the Central and Western Pyrenees.8 The French wildlife expert Jean-Jacques Camarra is a member of L’Equipe Ours (the Bear Team), managing their reintroduction. I met him at the offices of the National Office of Hunting and Wildlife (ONCFS) in Pau, in the same building where Count Henry Russell once had an apartment. A robust, athletic-looking man in his early sixties, Camarra originally trained as a metallurgist before his enthusiasm for mountains and mountain sports brought him to the Pyrenees, where he retrained as a biologist.
Camarra is a fervent supporter of what he regards as a successful experiment in wildlife conservation, which demonstrates that “big animals, big carnivores like this, can survive close to people, without problems.” His passion for bears is obvious. When I ask why the bear has had such a special place in the Pyrenean imagination, his eyes are shining as he explains, “Because the bear has a footprint like a human. He has five toes. He can stand up like humans. He can be free with his hands, to scratch trees. Second, he’s very intelligent. And thirdly, he’s very big. And fourth, because of his fur; he’s like a teddy bear.”
Camarra also recognizes that bears are “very dangerous for humans. They can be the best or the worst,” and he knows that his enthusiasm for his government’s conservation efforts is not universally shared. Opposition was relatively muted before the first reintroduction in 1996, but it was a very different matter ten years later, when the government reintroduced three Slovenian bears near the village of Arbas, some 31 miles (50 kilometers) to the east of Lourdes, followed by two more bears in nearby villages. Even before the reintroductions, anti-bear protesters stole bear-tracking equipment, threatened the French minister of ecology, and staged a series of angry and even violent demonstrations. In April 2006, anti-bear demonstrators in the Ariège vandalized the town hall at Arbas. In 2013 five teddy bears were hanged near the tourist office in the Ariège valley of Biros, and the road outside the office was painted with the slogans Mort aux ours (Death to bears) and Mort aux touristes (Death to tourists).
Such opposition is founded on the very real prospect of “Martin’s tithe”—the regular killing of sheep by bears. Such deaths are sometimes the result of direct attacks, but even the proximity of bears has caused sheep to die of fright or spontaneously abort. In 2013, bears killed 174 sheep in the French Pyrenees and another 35 in Spain. Given that the total number of sheep in the French Pyrenees generally exceeds 600,000, these losses may seem negligible to outsiders, but shepherds and sheep breeders are angered by them, and they also resent having to pay for the Pyrenean mountain dogs, or patous, and fences to protect their animals. In theory this protection is subsidized by the state, which also pays $370 (€300) in compensation for any animal losses.
Such measures have not dissipated the resentment felt by some pastoralists toward the conservationists and the “garbage bears” they have imported from Slovenia into the Pyrenees in the name of an abstract principle that has no relevance to the pastoral economy. Conservation has more appeal for villages like Arbas, whose economy is more dependent on tourism than sheep farming. In Camarra’s opinion, bears provide an invisible or semi-visible “ghostly presence,” which can be sensed but not seen. In some parts of the French Pyrenees, local authorities promote their areas as “bear country,” even producing place mats in restaurants that give the whole history of the bear conservation project.
Camarra believes that opposition to the French government’s reintroduction program is gradually disappearing and that shepherds can be persuaded to accept it. In his view, the bear is as much a part of Pyrenean and French heritage as sheep farming, and he also regards the reintroduction of bears as an indirect instrument of landscape conservation, since “if you don’t have bears, it’s more difficult to be against the roads, ski resorts and other things.” There is no doubt that the reintroduction of bears has benefited the Pyrenean tourist economy. In Aragon I led a walking group for five days through the Senda de Camille (Camille’s Path)—a circular walking route that had been specially created in honor of a male bear that is believed to have died in the region in 2010. There was no sign of Camille or any bears along the route, nor did we expect to find any, but a bear’s claw provides the motif for the local company that developed the circular trek, in another indication of the enduring attraction of Camarra’s “ghostly” ursine presence.
Bears also constitute an indirect tourist attraction in the bear festivals of the Eastern Pyrenees. Every second Sunday in February, the local youths of Prats-de-Mollo-la-Preste cover themselves in oil and soot and wrestle spectators to the ground before they are subdued by hommes en blanc (men in white) or “barbers” who pretend to “shave” them before another group dressed as “hunters” comes and “kills” the bears. This annual ritual re-creates a legend in which a bear is believed to have kidnapped a shepherdess and taken her into the forest to ravish her before she was rescued by a hunter. In other variants a single “human bear” dies, then stands up without his bear mask, and then picks out a woman from the spectators to dance with.
These Pyrenean bear festivals are featured in Charles Fréger’s striking photo-essay on the ancient “wild men” festivals that still persist in many European countries.9 For Fréger, these festivals constituted an “image of the savage” that hearkened back to the pre-Christian “tribal Europe.” One photograph taken in the French Pyrenees shows a man in a bear mask with monstrous teeth against a backdrop of forests and distant snow-covered mountains, an anthropomorphic image that simultaneously humanizes the “bear” and evokes the blurred boundaries between the wild and the human, in which the direction is by no means certain.
Shapeshifters
The Pyrenees have often constituted a stage on which this convergence has been acted out and imagined. One of the most famous “freak” attractions in early seventeenth-century London was a man called Don Sanchio Fernando, known as “the Bold Grimace Spaniard” for his ability to make unusual facial expressions, which he had allegedly learned from living with wild beasts in the Pyrenees for fifteen years. These experiences, according to a contemporary handbill, had given the Spaniard the peculiar ability to change the shape of his face at will: “He lolls out his Tongue a foot long; turns his Eyes in and out at the same time; contracts his face as small as an Apple; extends his mouth six inches and turns it into the shape of a Bird’s beak, and his eyes like to an Owl.”10
In Systema naturae (1758) the Swedish botanist and zoologist Carl Linnaeus added a new species, which he called Homo ferens (wild man), to his taxonomy of primates. Linnaeus characterized this species as mutus, tetrapus, and hirsutus (dumb, quadruped, and covered with hair), and he cited a number of episodes of feral children brought up by animals, who included the “two Pyrenees boys” cited in Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Discourse on the Origin of Human Inequality (1754). In a note rejecting Aristotle’s theory that humans were descended from quadrupeds, Rousseau referred to a 1719 newspaper report on two “savages . . . found in the Pyrenees, who ran through the mountains in the manner of quadrupeds.”
Rousseau mocked the idea that the Greek philosopher’s descendants might once have been “as hairy as a bear, and if moving on four feet with his gaze directed at the earth,” and insisted that these “Pyrenees boys” had reverted to all fours as a form of atavism, thereby demonstrating that Homo sapiens had always been as “structured at all times as I see him today, walking on two feet, using his hands as we use ours.” To a world that still saw the Pyrenees as a savage mountain wilderness where civilization had only a tenuous foothold, these atavistic feral children seemed as credible as Defoe’s wolf armies. The peoples of the Pyrenees have also projected their own anthropomorphic fantasies onto the surrounding landscape. The enigmatic figure of “the Sorcerer” at Les Trois-Frères cave depicts a deerlike figure with antlers that appears to be walking on two legs. Generations of Basque children have grown up with the legend of the basajaun—the wild man who inhabits the mountain forests. Sometimes described as a merciless ogre who feeds on human flesh and attacks lone travelers, the basajaun also appears as the benign guardian of the mountains and forests who warns shepherds of impending storms and approaching predators with a whistle that can carry more than a mile.
Such assistance, when it comes, must be rewarded, with donations of milk, cheese, bread, or nuts. The Basque philosopher and poet Joseph Augustin Chaho (1811–58) once described the basajaun as “tall and of prodigious strength: his whole body is covered with a long smooth coat resembling hair: he walks upright like a man, surpassing the stag in agility.” The basajaun also appears in the Spanish writer Dolores Redondo Meira’s bestselling Baztan trilogy, a crime series set in the Baztan Valley of Navarre, both as a threat and also as a source of solace to her tormented police inspector protagonist, Amaia Salazar.
In the first of the series, The Invisible Guardian (2013), one of Salazar’s colleagues is accidentally shot in the forest and wakes to find “a creature squatting down at my side, his face was almost totally covered in hair, but not like an animal’s, more like a man whose beard starts right below his eyes, intelligent, sympathetic eyes, almost human, except the iris covered almost the whole eye; there was barely any white, like a dog’s eyes.”
Basque mythology abounds with similar half-human, half-animal figures. There is the female version of the basajaun, the basandere, or “wild woman”; the one-eyed and sometimes cannibalistic giant known as the tartalo and his monstrous doglike companion the olano; the beautiful forest-dwelling fairies known as lamias, with female upper bodies and the legs of goats or cats, or fishtails, who spend all night combing their long blond hair and washing their white robes on golden washboards. Other regions of the Pyrenees have their own local variants—from the fairies known as hadas or encantadas that populate the mountains of Aragon and Catalonia, to the demoiselles or dames blanches—white ladies—of the French Pyrenees.
In 1859 Charles Richard Weld was surprised by the “curious superstitions” that still lingered among the peasants of Luz-Saint-Sauveur. These included “the Loup-Garou, a species of malevolent fiend corresponding to the Banshee of Ireland”; a “strange wicked demon called Yona Gorri, who though generally seen of a fiery red colour, has the power of appearing to the terrified peasants in a variety of hues”; and “L’Homme Noir”—the Black Man—who hurled ice showers down from the mountaintops.11
The monster of the Pyrenees: Blaise Ferrage, cannibal (Alamy stock image).
Such myths and fantasies were often associated with caves. According to Weld, the Yona Gorri was believed to inhabit a cave on the Pic d’Anie, where it “desecrated the country with thunderstorms” on the arrival of unexpected strangers, and the dames blanches were also imagined as cave dwellers. The Grottes de Gargas, south of Montréjau in the Hautes-Pyrénées, are famous for their stenciled wall prints of mutilated hands, which date back to the Upper Paleoltithic era. According to legend, the caves were once inhabited by a giant named Gargas, and they are also associated with a series of brutal crimes carried out by the Pyrenean “serial killer,” Blaise Ferrage, in 1779–90, whom the Marquis de Sade used as the model for the cannibalistic giant Minski, the “Hermit of the Apennines,” in Juliette.
Little is known about Ferrage, except that he was born in 1757 and worked as a stonemason until he was twenty-two years old, when he abruptly left home and went to live in one of the Gargas caves that was so small it could be entered only by crawling into it. From this refuge, Ferrage embarked on a spree of rape, necrophilia, and cannibalism that terrorized the surrounding valley. In little more than three years he shot, strangled, and sometimes ate more than two dozen men, women, and children, most of whom were shepherds and shepherdesses out with their flocks. His crimes were still well-known more than a century later when Sabine Baring-Gould visited the region.
Baring-Gould described Ferrage as “a small man, broad-shouldered, with unusually long arms, and . . . possessed of extraordinary strength,” who sometimes carried his victims alive to his cave, so that “the shrieks could be heard from afar, paralysing the timorous peasantry with fear.” Ferrage was the incarnation of some of the darkest Pyrenean myths and fears: the lupine cave dweller who, as Baring-Gould puts it, “had converted into a wild beast, who had renounced the society of his fellows to live among the rocks and tread the snow-fields, hearing naught save the howl of the wind, the cry of the birds of prey, and the baying of the wolves.”12 Such was the terror that Ferrage exercised over the local population that on one occasion he entered the village of Montagu in broad daylight, causing the villagers to abandon their market stalls and lock themselves in their homes. Even when he was arrested later that day he managed to escape and went on to commit more crimes.
Despite a reward on his head, no one dared to approach his hiding place for fear of being shot. Ferrage was eventually captured, when the police managed to persuade an informant to befriend him, share his cave, and eventually lead him into an ambush. In 1780 the Parliament of Languedoc put him on trial, and on Friday, December 13, 1783, the “anthropage of the Pyrenees” was broken on the wheel and his corpse exposed on the gibbet in the Place Saint-Georges, Toulouse.
The Ladies’ War
Pyrenean peasants were not always fearful of the wilderness and its real and imagined inhabitants. In the spring of 1829, forest guards, charcoal burners, iron manufacturers, and royal officials in the Castillonais district of the Couserans were attacked and threatened by groups of peasants brandishing firearms and other weapons, who sometimes pillaged and burned their houses. State officials reported that many of them referred to themselves as demoiselles (ladies) and dressed as women, wearing long shirts hanging down below their knees like skirts. Some of these “ladies” painted their faces red and black or wore cardboard carnival masks or white masks with holes punched into them. Others wore military headgear and sported pigs’ bristles on their faces or covered their heads with sheep or fox hides. One demoiselle “officer” arrested in the Ustou forest in July 1829 was found wearing “a French [soldier’s] hat, a wolf’s tail serving as panache for this hat, a net for masking his face, a rifle, two sacks of powder, and a pair of blue pants.”13
The “War of the Demoiselles” or Ladies’ War, was a direct response to the French government’s 1827 Forest Code, which imposed or reimposed restrictions on rights of access to Pyrenean forests that had previously been held in common. These restrictions were partly justified on the grounds of efficiency, but they were also designed to favor the interests of iron manufacturers and charcoal burners at the expense of local peasants, who used the forests for fuel, grazing, or small-scale agricultural production. It has never been entirely clear why the peasants chose to protest by dressing up as women and animals. Some historians have traced these “disguises” to carnival and the charivari tradition of playful rebellion against authority. Others have seen the demoiselles as a product of ariégeois folk traditions: they transformed themselves into forest “spirits,” fairies, and wild men in order to defend “their” forests against encroaching officialdom.
Whatever its causes, this metamorphosis was clearly intended to strike terror into their enemies, particularly the hated forest guards, known as salamagnos (salamanders) because of their green uniforms, who were charged with implementing the government’s new legislation, and it often succeeded. French officials frequently expressed their disgust at how readily forest guards took flight when confronted with groups of “women” brandishing guns, hatchets, and hoes and threatening to tear their eyes out. These protests received so much support that the French authorities deployed some six hundred soldiers in the affected districts in an attempt to restore order.
These troops initially had little impact, as the demoiselles moved more or less at will through forests that they knew better than any outsiders. In October 1830 a government commission was appointed to investigate the disturbances; it recommended a more lenient application of the Forest Code and granted an amnesty for previous “crimes and transgressions.” This policy achieved its objective. The demoiselles never again recovered the momentum they had shown the previous year, but their memory continued to live on. In 2006, demonstrators protesting the reintroduction of brown bears at the village of Arbas tossed bottles filled with lambs’ blood at the town hall, burned a bust of a brown bear, and chanted “Les demoiselles marchent devant vous, les demoiselles sont de retour” (The ladies are marching before you, the ladies are returning)—a slogan that may have mystified many outsiders, but which would have needed little explanation to many Ariegeois.
The Witches of Navarre
This slippage among the animal, the human, and the supernatural has not always been so playful. The village of Zugarramurdi is located in northern Navarre in the Xareta region adjoining the French border. To reach it from Spain requires a difficult drive up a twisting Pyrenean mountain road in sore need of repair, through a series of narrow valleys, forests, and deep gorges. Human settlements are rare, and there is little sign of any life at all except for the occasional eagles or buzzards. It comes as a relief to reach the sharp ridge overlooking the French province of Labourd and to descend toward Zugarramurdi’s stolid white houses, with their wooden eaves and exposed stone edges.
Just outside the village there is an enormous limestone cavern, with a white limestone roof some 50 feet (15 meters) high stained with wraith-like smoke trails left from disused limestone kilns, and numerous subchambers branching off the sides. It is a stunningly dramatic natural wonder, whose strange beauty is enhanced by the surrounding forests and fields and the stream that runs down from the narrow gorge at the upper entrance. Only the souvenir models of witches on broomsticks on sale at the entrance pay homage to the tragic events that unfolded in 1608, when a young woman named María de Ximildegui returned to Zugarramurdi and accused one of her neighbors of witchcraft.
Ximildegui claimed to be a repentant witch herself and said she had once attended a sabbath in the cave in which one of her neighbors had also participated. In the investigations that followed, ten women confessed to a series of horrendous crimes that included infanticide, vampirism, and the destruction of crops. The judicial process was initially confined to the village, and the accused were treated with surprising leniency. In 1609, however, Henry IV of France dispatched a state counsellor from the Parlement of Bordeaux named Pierre de Lancre (1553–1631) to investigate disturbing reports of witchcraft in the surrounding province. De Lancre arrived in Labourd at a time when many local Basques were absent on the Saint-Jean-de-Luz cod-fishing fleet in Newfoundland. Using torture to obtain testimony from children as young as six, he quickly concluded that this remote frontier province was infested with witches and devils who had taken refuge in Labourd after fleeing the efforts of Christian missionaries in America and Asia.14
The location of the Pyrenees on the periphery of France and Spain—and the presence of a large population of expelled Spanish Gypsies—undoubtedly reinforced de Lancre’s genuine conviction that Labourd was sick with witchcraft. De Lancre also had a visceral loathing of the Basques. In a subsequent account of his experiences, Tableau de l’inconstance des mauvais anges et demons (On the Inconstancy of Wicked Angels and Demons, 1612), he argued that Basques were naturally inclined toward witchcraft because “the women eat nothing but apples, they drink nothing but apple juice, and that is what leads them to so often offer a bite of the forbidden apple.”15 From his base in Saint-Jean-de-Luz, de Lancre unleashed a storm of virtuous terror in which hundreds of men, women, and children were arrested, tortured, and executed.
These investigations produced the usual semi-pornographic testimonies that tended to accompany such episodes, in which women confessed to having flown to sabbaths on broomsticks in Zugarramurdi and other places, where they pledged allegiance to the devil by kissing his behind and participating in orgies and obscene dances. Others claimed to have eaten children, dug up the bodies of the dead, and concocted poisons and spells to harm people or cause crops to fail. As was often the case, the confessions of these sorginak (witches) frequently involved animals. Sabbaths usually took place in a field known as the akelarre (a Basque word meaning “field of the he-goat”) such as the field alongside the Zugarramurdi cave, and their participants often described seeing the devil in the shape of a large goat “with a tail, and beneath it a black human face.”
Many witches confessed to having taken on the shape of animals to disguise themselves. The local population initially supported de Lancre’s campaign, but soon hundreds of people began streaming across the Spanish border pretending to be going on pilgrimages to Montserrat or Santiago de Compostela, as it became clear that no one in Labourd was safe from prosecution. De Lancre regarded these “refugees” as proof of his success and redoubled his efforts. By the end of the year, news of his campaign had reached the cod fleet in Newfoundland, and the fishermen returned home early to protect their womenfolk. Complaints about de Lancre’s excesses reached the ears of the French Crown, and he was recalled to Bordeaux.
De Lancre’s investigation also had an impact on neighboring Navarre, where the powerful Inquisition of Logroño returned to Zugarramurdi in 1610 to carry out a new investigation into the initial reports of witchcraft there. The inquisitor Don Juan Valle Alvarado spent several months in Zugarramurdi and the surrounding villages gathering testimony on some three hundred suspected witches in the area. In addition to the usual orgies outside the Zugarramurdi cave, Alvarado also reported that these witches “enjoy changing into different shapes so as not to be recognised and going out to frighten and hurt travellers. For the Devil, it seems, changes them into swine, goats and sheep, mares and other animals, whatever best suits his purpose.”16
Eventually, nine men and women from the village confessed, and the witches of Zugarramurdi were among the eleven witches burned in the great auto-da-fé at Logroño in November 1610. Meanwhile, the trials sparked a witch scare in northern Navarre and Guipúzcoa, in which thousands of people came under suspicion, and the Logroño inquisitors informed King Philip III that an ancient witches’ sect in the Pyrenees had spread its power throughout the region. By March 1611, inquisitors had concluded that 158 people in Zugarramurdi out of a total of 390 were witches and another 124 were suspected of witchcraft. These findings were disputed by the lawyer Alonso de Salazar y Frías, one of the more skeptical inquisitors at the Logroño trial. Ordered by the Inquisition to carry out a further investigation into the witchcraft epidemic in Navarre, Salazar carried out hundreds of interviews and discovered numerous inconsistencies in the testimonies presented to him. He eventually concluded that the majority had little or no credibility and told his surprised superiors that “I have not found even indications from which to infer that a single act of witchcraft has really occurred.”17
The Inquisition accepted Salazar’s report and never again persecuted witches with the intensity it had shown at Zugarramurdi. Today these bleak events are remembered in a permanent exhibition at the Witchcraft Museum in Zugarramurdi, which contains the names of the innocent men and women from the village who were executed for nothing, more than four centuries ago. The museum places the Navarre witch hunt within a continuum of persecution and intolerance that includes the Ku Klux Klan, the Nazis, and McCarthyism. Borrowing from the great Basque ethnologist Julio Caro Baroja and other modern students of witchcraft, the museum presents the concept of akelarre as a positive affirmation of the body, sexuality, and the natural world. Whether these witches really were the remnants of some Dionysian pre-Christian cult, as some have contended, or whether they were simply random victims of what the historian Henry Charles Lea has called “a disease of the imagination, created and stimulated by the persecution of witchcraft,” can never be known, but today the memory of Pyrenean witchcraft still lives on, in the museum at Zugarramurdi, in the crones on broomsticks, and in the chimeneas expantabrujas—witch-scaring chimneys—that can still be found in many villages in Upper Aragon and other parts of the Pyrenees.
The Accursed Race
The seventeenth-century witchcraft panic was a brutal but passing episode in the history of Pyrenean persecutions, and it pales in significance in comparison with the centuries-long persecution of the people known as Cagots who once populated the Pyrenees, the Landes, and parts of western France up to Brittany. Very little is known about how the Cagots came to be in the Pyrenees, or indeed about their ethnicity in general. It is not even known whether the Cagots were in fact members of the same ethnic group, although they were often depicted as such. The origins of the word “Cagot,” or “Agotes,” “Gahets,” or “Capets,” as they have also been known, have been variously attributed to a fusion of chien Gots or cani Gothi (Dog Goths)—which may be a reference to the Arian Goths defeated by the Frankish king Clovis in the sixth century. Others have claimed that the Cagots are descended from Saracens, persecuted Cathars, or medieval lepers.
Whatever their origins, there is little disagreement about the discrimination directed against them. For hundreds of years Cagots were not allowed to live near non-Cagots or do anything more than the most menial tasks. They could not walk in the middle of the street, drink water from common fountains, or sell food to non-Cagots. They could not enter churches, except through specially constructed low doorways that obliged them to bow. They were not allowed to receive Communion, though some Pyrenean villages allowed the priest to hand them pieces of bread on a long wooden fork. In some parts of the Pyrenees they were forbidden from owning more than twenty sheep, though Basque Cagots were not allowed to own any sheep at all. In 1672 the Estates of Navarre banned them from marrying non-Cagots. The Cagots of Navarre and Bordeaux were also ordered to wear a red cloth in the shape of a goose or duck foot on their shoulders.
In 1695 the Spanish government ordered the expulsion of the Cagots from northern Spain and offered a reward to any of their neighbors who carried it out. Hundreds of Cagots fled or were driven into France, where they were turned back and died in the mountains. The reasons for this persecution were never clear, even to those who inflicted it. Some historians contend the Cagots were descended from lepers. Others believe that the Cagots were associated with cretinism or goiter—a despised affliction that was supposedly common among the Cagots. To some extent the hatred directed at the Cagots was itself the product of centuries of persecution that defined them as a race maudit—an accursed race—and which found its own justifications.
Cagots, it was believed, were not fully human and were born with tails, which their parents cut off at birth to hide their origins. The imagined “wildness” of the Cagots was also captured by an old Basque folk song that proclaimed:
This is how you may recognize the cagot:
You must look first at his ears:
One is bigger, and the other
Is round and covered with
Long hair on every side.18
The Cagots were also alleged to exude a particular stench. In 1600, surgeons in Navarre bled twenty-two Cagots in search of “some new kind of salt in their blood” and found nothing. Other popular myths accused them of cannibalism and the power to make fruit shrivel merely by holding it in their hands. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, local French authorities in the Pyrenees made occasional attempts to legislate against such discrimination, and the Cagots themselves did not always accept it passively. In 1789 French Cagots took advantage of the Revolution to destroy archives containing records that identified them. Many Cagots eventually succeeded in assimilating into their local communities or emigrated to places where their status would not be recognized, but others continued to be identified by local tradition, if not by law, and were shunned as a consequence.
The Cagots exercised a morbid fascination over many eighteenth- and nineteenth-century visitors to the Pyrenees, and also over many more distant observers such as the English novelist Mrs. Gaskell, who wrote a powerful essay that depicted their persecution as a universal warning on the evils of irrational prejudice.19 Ramond often encountered Cagots during his Pyrenean rambles. On the one hand he claimed to see in them “a degradation, a dullness, and stupidity . . . which deprives them of the last remains of the intelligence of man, together with the last traces of his figure.”20 Yet Ramond also described the Cagots as “creatures whom society has not been able to render so vile as it has attempted to make them. I have met with brothers who loved each other with that tenderness which is the most pressing want of isolated men.”21
Writing in 1859, Charles Richard Weld predicted that “the time is still distant when the word Cagot will cease to be a term of reproach in the Pyrenees, and that the wretched peasant afflicted with goitre will long be regarded as belonging to the ‘races maudites.’”22 Traces of these “Pyrenean untouchables” can still be found on both sides of the Pyrenees in the sixty-odd churches containing bricked-up “Cagot doorways” or Cagot holy water fonts, but the reasons for their persecution remain as mysterious as they were to many of the nineteenth-century visitors to the Pyrenees who first brought their plight to the attention of the outside world. And like the shape-shifters, feral children, and other wild things that once populated the Pyrenean imagination, they, too, belong to a world that has largely ceased to exist.