Cagoules and cowls

His heart danced upon her movements like a cork upon a tide. He heard what her eyes said to him from beneath their cowl and knew that in some dim past, whether in life or revery, he had heard their tale before.

James Joyce: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

In the process of moving house recently, I came across a bag of cycling clothing that has been at the bottom of a wardrobe for a few years. I’ve now transported it to my new house, where it will probably lie untouched at the bottom of a different wardrobe for another few years. Among the piles of lonely Lycra in the bag, there is what I would describe as a ‘cagoule’ (no doubt it has a sexier name in cycling parlance, speed jacket or rain buffer or body lozenge, perhaps), from when my brothers and I rode from England to France in an odyssey of grit and pure manliness that made Le Tour and all the riders in it look puny and tame. Anyhow, this rediscovery led me to wonder what the etymology of cagoule might be – there are no other words like it in English, after all – and this post will meander through monks, fascists and make-up manufacturers to share what I’ve learnt. Because you’re worth it.

The story starts with the Proto-Indo-European root *(s)keu- ‘cover, conceal’. This is the mother root of the English verb hide, Welsh cuddio ‘hide, conceal’ and Latin custos ‘guard, protector, keeper’ – from which English has custodian and custody; Latin cutis ‘skin’, cognate with the other English hide ‘skin’, as in I’ll tan your hide, and sky, which is etymologically ‘a cover’; and also Latin culus ‘arse’ – generally kept under cover – which has many posterial descendants in Romance languages, such as French cul, Italian and Spanish culo and Portuguese cu. The *(s)keu root is also thought to be the ancestor of Latin cuculla ‘hood’, source of Old French cogole, Modern French cagoule and Old English cugele, later reduced to cugle, cowle and finally, Modern English cowl, ‘garment with a hood’, particularly associated with the hooded cloak worn by monks, though sometimes referring to the hood alone. (This sound change whereby Old English words with a medial -g- pronounced [ɣ] between vowels is reduced to a single long vowel or diphthong is common in the phonological history of English – Old English boga becomes bow, fugol becomes fowl and nægl becomes nail, as opposed to German Bogen, Vogel and Nagel – all with medial -g- pronounced [g]. Hence, the current manager of the German national football team, Julian Nagelsmann, whose family name is an occupational surname for those working with nails, that is, blacksmiths or carpenters, rather than manicurists, would be a Nailsman if he was English.)

In 1935, French fascist Eugène Deloncle founded the Comité Secret d’Action Révolutionnaire, a paramilitary group better known as La Cagoule ‘the hood’, due to its ideology and rituals that were reminiscent of the American Ku Klux Klan. For instance, the initiation rite for new members included a Grand Master and assesseurs cloaked in red and black respectively, with their faces covered by a cowl. A sword and torches would be placed on a table draped in the French flag and each man would raise his right arm and swear the Latin oath ‘Ad majorem Galliæ gloriam’ (‘For the greater glory of France’). So, essentially, it was as camp as The Traitors, but instead of Claudia Winkleman, there were an assortment of bigots and zealots following the grand traditions of right wing pomp and circumstance. La Cagoule was set up to discredit and bring down the left-wing Popular Front government in the last years of the Third Republic through whatever means necessary: assassinations, bombings of Paris synagogues and sabotage (often blamed on the communists in false flag operations) were all standard tactics for the group. Despite the Cagoulards’ subversive activities, the organisation received substantial support from reactionary elements on the right – the same elements that would end up backing the Vichy regime in 1940 after the Fall of France and collaborating with the Nazis. The principal financial backer of La Cagoule was Eugène Schueller, the founder of L’Oréal, and an intimate friend of Deloncle, but the group also enjoyed the support of the right-wing National Federation of Taxpayers and companies such as Lesieur, Lafarge, Renault and Michelin, all of whom favoured a bunch of antisemitic, violent fascists to protect their vested interests over the democratically elected Popular Front.

Many Cagoulards were imprisoned in 1937 when the group was infiltrated by the police and a plot to assassinate the Prime Minister, Léon Blum was foiled. However, they were released to fight in the French Army with the outbreak of World War II. Some would go on to join the French Resistance, others would join the Free French Forces of Charles de Gaulle – a leader rumoured to have been sympathetic to La Cagoule, notwithstanding his French national hero status – while others joined Fascist movements or became members of the Milice. The latter, a puppet state-sponsored paramilitary group attached to the Vichy regime of Marshal Philippe Pétain – another French national hero who blotted his copybook in no uncertain fashion – fought the Resistance and enforced the antisemitic policies of the Nazis. While members of the Milice and La Cagoule were imprisoned or executed as the tide of the war turned and in its immediate aftermath, the industrialists who had bankrolled and supported these groups tended to escape scot-free. (Scot-free has nothing to do with the Scots – though free things are stereotypically dear to their hearts – but comes from the Old Norse word skot ‘tax, payment’, and a scot was a medieval, municipal tax, so those who got away scot-free were able to avoid paying their share.) Eugène Schueller, in particular, went from strength to strength, living in the lap of luxury with the lasting success of L’Oréal. His wealth was passed down to future generations. His daughter, Liliane Bettencourt, was the richest woman in the world when she died in 2017 and his granddaughter, Françoise Bettencourt Meyers, Vice-Chairwoman of L’Oréal’s board of directors, is currently the world’s second richest woman, with an estimated personal fortune of US$100 billion.

The English distinction between cowl ‘hood of a monk’ and cagoule ‘waterproof raincoat’ gives us a pair of doublets, ‘words (in the same language) representing the same ultimate word but differentiated in form’ (OED). These doublets either enter the recipient language from different routes or are borrowed from a donor language after the form or meaning of the original words has changed. Cagoule isn’t attested as an English word before the 1950s, though cowl had been in use for over a millennium. With the patenting of the roll-up cagoule in the early 1960s by former Royal Marine, Noel Bibby, and the launch of his Peter Storm brand, cagoules became popular, even fashionable, and Louis Vuitton, Gucci and others have regularly put cagoules on the catwalk. Doublets may remain quite close to each other, but they often end up diverging quite dramatically. Examples of the former group include fragile and frail, cave and cavern, and frenetic and frantic, while the latter category has pairs such as clock and cloak from Medieval Latin clocca ‘bell, clock’, plant and clan from Latin planta ‘shoot, seedling’ and even opposites like host and guest, inherited from the Proto-Indo-European root *gʰostis ‘host, guest, stranger, enemy’. This root has spawned a lot of confusion – a host is hospitable, but can also be hostile, you are a guest in a hotel, hostel or hospital, as well as a German Gasthaus or English guesthouse and internationally we have Czech host and Slovak host’ meaning ‘guest’, not to mention Italian oste, which means both ‘innkeeper’ – the host of an osteria, and ‘enemy army’, likely to be unwelcome guests.