Memory and Collective Identity in Occitanie: The Cathars in History and Popular Culture

Catharism, or Albigensianism, was a dualist religion which probably originated in the Balkans before appearing in Languedoc, southwestern France, in the first half of the twelfth century. ¹ It was a religion founded on the opposition of light and darkness, of God and Satan, of the spiritual and the temporal world. From an orthodox Catholic theological perspective, Catharism was plainly heretical: according to its doctrine, God did not create the temporal world, Christ never took on human form, nor suffered on the Cross, and baptism by water would not bring salvation. The only sacrament practiced by the Cathars was the consolamentum, or baptism of the Holy Spirit. It was the only means of salvation. The Cathar clergy, or Perfects, were those who had already received the consolamentum as part of their ritual of ordination and were already saved. The lay Cathars, or Believers, were required to receive the same sacrament before death in order to be saved too. ² Much like the Waldensians, the Cathars also rejected ecclesiastical authority in an effort to return to the values of simplicity and abstinence, virtues from which they believed the Roman Church had departed. ³ And because many of the local lords sympathized with the Cathars, the heresy also seemed to pose a threat to the potential establishment of royal power in the region. ⁴

In 1208 Pierre de Castelnau, a papal legate, was assassinated in the town of Saint-Gilles in Languedoc. His murder was blamed on the Cathars and prompted Pope Innocent III to launch a Crusade against them. The Church, together with an army of northern French nobles led by Simon de Montfort, conducted a series of raids, sieges and battles, seeking out heretics and Cathar sympathizers. The Crusade was violent and merciless--heretics and their sympathizers were often either slaughtered or burned alive at the stake. The Crusade lost some momentum, however, after the death of de Montfort in 1218 and mounting resistance by southern principalities. ⁵ In 1225, Pope Honorious III launched a second Crusade, this time led by Louis VIII. Ultimately, Languedoc was subordinated to the kingdom of France under Phillip Augustus and his successors in 1229 with the Treaty of Paris, ⁶ and the Cathar heresy was finally repressed after the siege at the castle at Montségur in 1244 and the establishment of the Inquisition. ⁷

Whilst much is known about the Crusades led against the Cathars, ⁸ little is actually known with any certainty about the Cathar heresy itself. To begin with, surviving documentation of Catharism is partial, and what does remain--the theological refutations of the heresy and the detailed procès-verbaux of the Inquisition's interrogations and sentences--is of overwhelmingly orthodox Catholic origin. These documents reveal that the Inquisitors were chiefly concerned with establishing how Cathars deviated from an orthodox norm and say very little about other aspects of their beliefs. Only this century has this documentation been modestly supplemented by the discovery of a doctrinal text on dualism, the Liber de duobus principiis, in Florence in 1939 by Antoine Dondaine and the publication of several original Cathar manuscripts. ⁹

Despite the little that has been known about the heresy with any certainty, historians have been writing about the Cathars and the Crusade for over seven hundred years now and have generated very eclectic images of them. The first literary texts of the Crusade appeared in the thirteenth century. These generally took the form of chronicles or chansons de geste, written down or sung either during the Crusade or immediately after. They often recounted much of the military drama associated with the events of the Crusade and remained relatively silent about the tenets of Catharism. ¹⁰

Later, from the period of the Reformation, the history of the Cathars was debated within the context of the religious conflict between Catholics and Protestants. Catholic polemicists used the Cathars as the misguided ancestors to the...