The castles of Pays Cathare. A Multi-Layered Heritage?

The Cathar movement spread over the 12th century into some of the most economically and culturally vibrant regions of Western Europe, maintaining its root in the south of France. After being declared heretics, the Cathars were repeatedly persecuted, until their total disappearance in the fourteenth century. After returning to vogue at the end of the eighteenth century, the legacy of this heresy has gradually become an important tourist resource for several territories of France’s Occitanie region, especially since the middle of the last century. In particular, since 1992 the Department of Aude has institutionally named its territory “Pays Cathare”, and systematized more than twenty sites in the circuit “Les Sites du Pays Cathare”, including castles, fortresses, museums and abbeys. Among these, several castles that were once the stage of important clashes between Cathars and Catholics, became later in time modern-style fortifications, used as military garrison on the border between France and Aragon until 1659, the year that sanctioned their progressive abandonment. Focusing particularly on the fortress of Montségur, this contribution aims at highlighting the typical mechanisms of the process of patrimonialization of the so-called “Chateaux cathares” (the name commonly used to advertised these locations, which made some of the fortresses of Occitanie renown among the general public). This connotation though may represent a stretch as can be inferred from the fact that several of them - Termes, Puilaurens, Peyrepertuse, Quéribus, Aguilar, Lastours and Montségur - are currently in the tentative list of UNESCO World Heritage Sites as an extension of the citadel of Carcassonne under the title of “Châteaux Sentinelles de Montagne”.