French people generally are not very fussy eaters and will eat many things that other peoples may be a bit afraid of—like frogs’ legs or snails or calf brains. This lack of fussiness may seem a virtue, an enduring remnant of the days when most French people were peasants and could not afford to be choosy about what appeared on their tables. But unfortunately, it makes it a bit difficult for vegetarians and vegans, or those with gluten or lactose intolerance, to eat out in France. The response of many French people to any special dietary requirements usually runs along the lines of, “We have no time to tolerate intolerance.” In fact, the French can be so blasé about the separation of meat and vegetable that in 2015, Cassegrain, one of the nation’s leading purveyors of canned vegetables, admitted that some of its products included beef flavoring.
To be sure, it’s not universally bleak. The environmental consequences of meat production have helped inspire an upsurge in French vegetarianism in the past few years, as have relatively high prices for meat. Restaurants increasingly feature vegetarian options, and leading chefs have embraced the vegetarian ethos. But still, less than 5 percent of the population is vegetarian, and most French people have probably never met a vegan. French school cafeterias refuse to offer vegetarian options on principle, believing that all French children should partake of the same cuisine.
At least today, however, the French are not burning vegans alive for their culinary heresies. Progress has been made since the thirteenth century, when, despite the uneven success of the Crusades in the Holy Land, the idea of crusading remained quite popular, and was gradually adapted for the struggle against Christian heretics within Europe itself. In France, this new form of crusade was directed mainly against a Christian heresy known as Catharism, whose adherents not only followed a radically divergent religious agenda but refused to eat the meat and dairy products so fundamental to French cuisine. Unfortunately, this dietary deviance contributed to their downfall, betraying adherents to the relentless interrogators of the Inquisition.
Much as the Gauls did not originally see themselves as Gauls, the Cathars never called themselves Cathars. They called their leaders bons hommes (good men) or bonnes femmes (good women), and they might refer to their community as bons chrétiens (good Christians). But their critics called them Cathars, and used the term Perfects to describe their leaders. The terms stuck, and so for simplicity’s sake, we’ll refer to them as Cathars here, as most conventional histories do.
The Cathar heresy took root in France in the twelfth century, mainly in the southwest region then ruled by the Count of Toulouse. The beautiful city of Toulouse, known as la Ville Rose thanks to the pinkish hue of its terra-cotta buildings, was founded in the Roman era, and over the centuries it served as a capital for this key region linking the Pyrenees, the Atlantic, and the Mediterranean. Technically, the county of Toulouse was part of France, and the French king was the overlord of its count, but in the still-feudal system of the day, the Count of Toulouse actually controlled a richer and bigger area of France than the king—he was also Duke of Narbonne and Marquis of Provence—and could do more or less as he pleased.
Culturally and linguistically, the county of Toulouse was very different from the northern reaches of France. In the south, people spoke Occitan, known as langue d’oc (oc being the word for “yes” in Occitan), and over time the southern regions where it was spoken became known as the Languedoc. In the north, people spoke a different version of French known as langue d’oïl, the ancestor of modern French. Socially, the Languedoc was seen as a more open, tolerant, and cosmopolitan society: troubadour culture thrived there, for example, and women played a more prominent role in society. It is therefore not surprising that the Cathars found a greater degree of acceptance in the southern regions.
The Cathars were yet another manifestation of a curious tradition of dualist heresies that had bedeviled the Christian Church since its earliest days. The Cathars believed that our material world was actually created by the devil, and a separate spiritual world existed that was governed by God. The forces of evil and good were implacably divided and eternally at war with each other. Unfortunately, human beings were consigned to live in the evil material world, and even worse, they were doomed to be repeatedly reincarnated into it. The only hope for salvation was to lead a virtuous life and hope to be drawn by God into the spiritual world. But the Cathars argued that the Roman Catholic Church had corrupted the teachings of Christ and was working hand in hand with the devil. So it is not really surprising that the Church took a dim view of Catharism and its blatant disregard for orthodox Christian beliefs.
The leaders of the Cathars were called “Perfects,” as this was what they were purported to be doing, living a “perfect life” according to their beliefs. These exemplary leaders adhered to the “rule of justice and truth,” which emphasized ritual prayer, fasting, and manual labor. They were pacifists, believing that violence and war were forbidden by Christ’s teachings; only God had the prerogative to take a human life. They abstained from sexual intercourse, as this only created new children who would be trapped in our evil material world. And given the importance of food in daily life, it was perhaps inevitable that they had quite a few rules about what could and could not be eaten. Eating any form of meat was bad, because there was every possibility that we might be reincarnated as an animal in the next life. Milk-based products should be avoided because they not only came from animals but depended on animals reproducing (reproduction is bad, remember). Strangely, Perfects would eat fish, as it was believed at the time that fish did not reproduce in a sexual way. They also had no problem eating fruits and vegetables (they had to eat something, after all) and therefore also no problem with wine. Ordinary followers of the Cathar faith did not have to adhere to these strict rules and could still eat meat and procreate. Both men and women could be Perfects—after all, a man might die today and be reincarnated as a woman, so there was no need for strict patriarchal segregation.
The Cathars were more or less tolerated in many parts of the Languedoc. But in Rome, Pope Innocent III was less inclined to be tolerant, eventually calling for a crusade against the Cathars. French northerners enthusiastically responded to the pope’s call. After all, what was not to like? A crusade close to home, absolution of all one’s sins, and the chance to win some land, loot, and glory. The Languedoc might be reduced to ashes—thus actually confirming the Cathar belief in a worldly hell—but this sort of barbarism was allowed when fighting enemies of the Church. The campaign became known as the Albigensian Crusade, for many Cathars lived around the town of Albi, and were thus sometimes referred to as Albigensians.
The crusade was launched from Lyon in 1209, and its first major target was the Cathar stronghold of Béziers, one of the oldest and most picturesque towns in the south of France. Many Catholics also lived there, and when the crusaders arrived and began besieging the town, they were given the chance to depart and escape the heretics’ fate. But they refused to abandon their fellow citizens, and so before the town was stormed, the attackers asked the papal legate commanding the crusaders—Arnaud Amaury, the abbot of Cîteaux—how they should distinguish between the Cathars and the Catholics. The Cistercian abbot’s infamous reply: “Kill them all—the Lord will know his own.” The town was quickly taken and burned to the ground, and all of its inhabitants—about twenty thousand people—slaughtered in a horrific bloodbath.
Carcassonne was subdued next and given to the new leader of the crusade, a devout Christian warrior and veteran crusader named Simon de Montfort. For nearly a decade, Montfort terrorized the southwest, sacking towns, burning Cathars alive, gouging out the eyes of captured prisoners. He eventually met his death during the second siege of Toulouse, crushed by a stone launched from a catapult operated by a group of women within the city walls. (The celebratory cry that went up that day—“Montfort is dead! Long live Toulouse!”—was still invoked as a generator of civic pride as late as the nineteenth century.)
Despite their early victories in Béziers and Carcassonne, the crusaders actually took two decades to completely pacify the Languedoc. In 1229, an end to the crusade was negotiated between the Count of Toulouse and the crown. It is not known exactly how many people died in the crusade, but estimates of several hundred thousand are common. The crusade broke the autonomy of the southern nobles and was a key event in the gradual absorption of southern France into the central state ruled by Paris.
There were still a few rebellious holdouts after 1229 in the supposedly impregnable Cathar mountain fortresses. The most notorious of these was Montségur (“safe mountain”), a breathtaking hilltop fort in the Pyrenees surrounded by rugged cliffs and a deep gorge. Around four thousand Cathars, including more than two hundred Perfects, took refuge there in May 1243, besieged by a large army commanded by the seneschal of Carcassonne. Thanks to the difficult terrain, they were able to withstand the siege for ten months, but eventually their attackers made use of Basque mercenaries, gifted in mountain warfare, to climb the mountain heights by night and breach the fort’s defenses. This surprise attack led to the Cathar surrender—but not before they allegedly smuggled an unnamed treasure out of the fort. (According to which conspiratorial website you visit, this might have been anything from a vast trove of gold to the Holy Grail.) The Perfects refused to renounce their faith and were burned together in a great pyre.
The fall of Montségur represented one of the dying gasps of Catharism, but what really destroyed it completely was the Inquisition. In 1233, Pope Gregory IX decided that the Dominican order, founded by a Spanish priest named Domingo de Guzmán partly in response to the Cathar threat, would be the perfect tool to root out the heretics. The Dominican inquisitors were judge, jury, and prosecutor combined, and after 1252, they were authorized by the pope to torture people if it would help yield confessions. They answered to no one but the pope and were feared and hated all over the Languedoc. They relied on informants and coercion, and their judgments led many people to the stake (burning people alive became a common execution method for heresy in the medieval era, with fire thought to purify as it destroys).
When poring over the records of the Cathar interrogations, the number of questions related to food is especially striking. The limited diet of the Cathars was well known, and this became a convenient way for inquisitors to identify heresy. Often one of the first questions posed to the acquaintances of a suspected heretic would be something like “Did you eat together, and what did you eat?” If the reply was “Always fish and vegetables,” then the inquisitors had the medieval equivalent of probable cause.1
Thankfully, the worst that might happen to vegetarians or vegans in France today is a soupçon of scorn from those who believe any nonconformist eating habit is a modern form of heresy against the nation of France. But as more and more French people embrace a meat-free lifestyle, the future for vegetarians in France appears far more promising than the fate of the unfortunate Cathars.
The ruins of the mountain fortress of Montségur, last stand of the Cathars. Photograph by authors, 2016.
This small stone memorial marks the spot where more than two hundred Cathars were burned to death after the fall of Montségur. Photograph by authors, 2016.