A little background here, Bruno said, is important to understand: For thirty years the peasants had been conscripted by the nobility to fight the religious wars. For a peasant who had never strayed more than a half day’s walk from where he was born, these wars were abstract, wars he was told he must die for and also must pay for, whether through taxation or extortion or land seizure. This situation and its discontents partly explains how it was that peasants and Cagots, historical enemies, suddenly conspired and came together to attack the nobles.

Peasants had targeted the Cagots for generations, and so this collusion between Cagot and peasant was shocking. It was as if, Bruno said, the poor white overseer and the Black man forced into chattel slavery had colluded against plantation owners in the American South, as if the poor white overseer all at once discarded his racial superiority, recognizing it as a dirty prize and little more, for his own servitude.