Beast of Gévaudan

The Beast of Gévaudan (La Bête du Gévaudan, ; La Bèstia de Gavaudan) is the historic name associated with a man-eating animal or animals that terrorized the former province of Gévaudan (consisting of the modern-day department of Lozère and part of Haute-Loire), in the Margeride Mountains of south-central France between 1764 and 1767.

The attacks, which covered an area spanning 90 by, were said to have been committed by one or more beasts of a tawny/russet colour with dark streaks/stripes and a dark stripe down its back, a tail "longer than a wolf's" ending in a tuft according to contemporary eyewitnesses. It was said to attack with formidable teeth and claws, and appeared to be the size of a calf or cow and seemed to fly or bound across fields towards its victims. These descriptions from the period could identify the beast as a young lion, a striped hyena, a large wolf, a large dog, or a wolfdog, though its identity is still the subject of debate.

The Kingdom of France used a considerable amount of wealth and manpower to hunt the animals responsible, including the resources of several nobles, soldiers, royal huntsmen, and civilians. The number of victims differs according to the source. A 1987 study estimated there had been 210 attacks, resulting in 113 deaths and 49 injuries; 98 of the victims killed were partly eaten. Other sources claim the animal or animals killed between 60 and 100 adults and children and injured more than 30. Victims were often killed by having their throats torn out. The beast was reported killed several times before the attacks finally stopped.

Beginnings


The Beast of Gévaudan committed its first recorded attack in the early summer of 1764. A young woman, who was tending cattle in the Mercoire Forest near the town of Langogne in the eastern part of Gévaudan, saw a beast "like a wolf, yet not a wolf" come at her. However, the bulls in the herd charged the beast, keeping it at bay. They then drove it off after it attacked a second time. Shortly afterwards, on 30 June, the beast's first official victim was recorded: 14-year-old Jeanne Boulet was killed near the village of Les Hubacs near Langogne. On 1 July, this victim was buried "without sacraments" because she could not confess before her death. However, the burial certificate specifies that she was killed by "the ferocious beast" (French: la bette [sic] féroce), which suggests that she is not the first victim but only the first declared. A second victim was reported on 8 August. Aged 14, she lived in the hamlet of Masméjean, in the parish of Puy-Laurent. These two victims were killed in the Allier valley.

From the end of August and in September, other victims were recorded in the Mercoire Forest or its surroundings. Throughout the remainder of 1764, more attacks were reported in the region. Very soon, terror gripped the populace because the beast was repeatedly preying on lone men, women, and children as they tended livestock in the forests around Gévaudan. Reports note that the beast seemed only to target the victim's head or neck regions. Some witnesses claimed the beast had supernatural abilities. They believed it could walk on its hind legs and feet like humans. They believed the beast performed astounding leaps. They also believed the beast could repel bullets and come back from the dead after being struck and wounded.

Increased attention


By late December 1764, rumors had begun circulating that there might be a pair of animals behind the killings. This was because there had been such a high number of attacks in such a short space of time and because many of the attacks appeared to have occurred or were reported nearly simultaneously. Some contemporary accounts suggest the creature was seen with another such animal, while others report that the beast was accompanied by its young.

On 31 December, the Bishop of Mende Gabriel-Florent de Choiseul-Beaupré, also Count of Gévaudan, called for prayers and penance. This appeal has remained in history under the name of "commandment of the Bishop of Mende". All the priests of the diocese had to announce it to their faithful. In this long text, the bishop described the beast as a scourge sent by God to punish men for their sins. He quoted Saint Augustine in evoking the "justice of God", as well as the Bible and the divine threats uttered by Moses: "I will arm the teeth of wild beasts against them". Following this commandment, prayers of Forty Hours' Devotion were observed for three consecutive Sundays.

In spite of these divine pleas, the massacre continued. On 12 January 1765, Jacques Portefaix and seven children from the village of Villaret, in the parish of Chanaleilles, were attacked by the beast. After several attacks, they drove it away by staying grouped together. The encounter eventually came to the attention of King Louis XV, who awarded 300 livres to Portefaix and another 350 livres to be shared among his companions. The king also rewarded Portefaix with an education at the state's expense. He then decreed that the French state would help find and kill the beast. On 11 February, in the parish of Le Malzieu, was buried a little girl "about twelve years old who had been partly devoured on the present day by a man-eating beast that has been ravaging this country for nearly three months".

By April 1765, the story of the beast had spread throughout Europe. The Courrier d'Avignon and English journalists made fun of the impotence of royal power in the face of a simple animal. Meanwhile, the local bishop and the intendants had to deal with an influx of mail; people from all over France suggesting more or less eccentric methods to overcome the beast. The court also issued depictions of the beast in Gévaudan so that "everyone [was] less terrified at his approach and less likely to be mistaken" and so that the packs of hunting dogs could be trained to chase the beast thanks to an effigy "executed in cardboard".

Royal intervention


First Captain Duhamel of the Clermont Prince dragoons and his troops were soon sent to Gévaudan. Although extremely zealous in his efforts, non-cooperation on the part of the local herders and farmers stalled Duhamel's efforts. On several occasions he almost shot the beast, but was hampered by the incompetence of his guards. When the village of Le Malzieu was not present and ready as the beast crossed the Truyère river, Duhamel became frustrated.

When Louis XV agreed to send two professional wolf hunters, Jean Charles Marc Antoine Vaumesle d'Enneval and his son Jean-François, Captain Duhamel was forced to stand down and return to his headquarters in Clermont-Ferrand. Cooperating with d'Enneval was impossible as the two differed too much in their strategies; Duhamel organised wolf hunting parties while d'Enneval and his son believed the beast could only be shot using stealthy techniques. Father and son D'Enneval arrived in Clermont-Ferrand on 17 February 1765, bringing eight bloodhounds that had been trained in wolf hunting. Over the next four months, the pair hunted for Eurasian wolves, believing that one or more of these animals was the beast. However, when the attacks continued, the D'Ennevals were replaced in June 1765 by François Antoine (sometimes wrongly identified with his son, Antoine de Beauterne), the king's sole arquebus bearer and lieutenant of the Hunt, who arrived in Le Malzieu on 22 June.

On 11 August, Antoine organised a great hunt. That day saw the feat of the "Maid of Gévaudan". Marie-Jeanne Vallet, about 20 years old, was the servant of the parish priest of Paulhac. In the company of other peasant women, she was taking a footbridge to cross a small stream when the beast appeared. The women took a few steps back but the beast threw itself on Marie-Jeanne. The latter managed to plant her spear into its chest. The beast dropped into the river and disappeared into the woods. The story quickly reached Antoine, who went to the scene. He found that the spear was indeed covered in blood and that the traces found were similar to those of the beast. In a letter to Saint-Florentin, Minister of the King's House, comparing Marie-Jeanne to Joan of Arc, he nicknamed her the "Maid of Gévaudan".

On 20 or 21 September, Antoine killed a large grey wolf measuring 80 cm high, 1.7 m long and weighing 60 kg. The wolf, which was named Le Loup de Chazes after the nearby Abbaye des Chazes, was said to have been quite large for a wolf. Antoine officially stated: "We declare by the present report signed from our hand, we never saw a big wolf that could be compared to this one. Hence, we believe this could be the fearsome beast that caused so much damage." The animal was further identified as the culprit by several attack survivors, who recognised the scars on its body inflicted by victims defending themselves. Among them were Marie-Jeanne Vallet and her sister.

After the report was written, François Antoine's son loaded the animal onto his horse and set off for Paris. At Saint-Flour, he showed it to Monsieur de Montluc. In Clermont-Ferrand, he had it stuffed. He left Clermont on 27 September and arrived at Versailles on 1 October, where he was hailed as a hero. The beast was exhibited in the Jardins du Roi. Meanwhile, François Antoine and his gamekeepers stayed in the Auvergne woods to chase down the beast's female partner and her two grown pups, which had been reported near the Abbey of Chazes. On 19 October, Antoine succeeded in killing the female wolf and a pup, which seemed already larger than its mother. At the examination of the pup, it appeared to have a double set of dewclaws, a hereditary malformation found in the Bas-Rouge or Beauceron dog breed. The other pup was shot and hit and was believed to have died while retreating between the rocks. Antoine returned to Paris on 3 November and received a large sum of money (over 9,000 livres) as well as fame, titles, and awards.

Final attacks


The month of November passed without any attack being reported. The populace dared to believe that Antoine had indeed killed the beast. In a letter from 26 November, the syndic Étienne Lafont affirmed to the intendant of Languedoc: "We no longer hear of anything relating to the beast". But quickly, rumors spread of new attacks, towards Saugues and Lorcières. On 2 December, two boys aged 6 and 12 were further attacked, suggesting that the beast was still alive. The beast tried to capture the youngest, but it was successfully fought off by the older boy. Soon after, successful attacks followed and some of the shepherds witnessed that the beast showed no fear around cattle at all. A dozen more deaths are reported to have followed attacks near La Besseyre-Saint-Mary.

Until the beginning of 1766, these facts remained episodic and no one knew if they were attributable to the beast or to wolves. However, in a letter he wrote to the intendant of Auvergne on 1 January 1766, Monsieur de Montluc seemed convinced that the beast had indeed reappeared. The intendant alerted the king, but Louis XV no longer wanted to hear about a ferocious beast that his arquebus bearer had overcome. From then on, newspapers no longer reported any of the attacks that occurred in Gévaudan or in the south of Auvergne.

In March 1766, the attacks multiplied. The local gentlemen now knew that their salvation would not come from the court. On 24 March, the Particular Estates of Gévaudan were held at Marvejols. Étienne Lafont and the young Marquis d'Apcher, a local nobleman, recommend poisoning the corpses of dogs and carrying them to the usual passages of the beast. But the latter did not seem to cover as much ground as before; it settled in the Trois Monts region—Mont Mouchet, Mont Grand and Montchauvet—about 15 km apart.

The measures taken proved ineffective. Small hunts were organised in vain. The beast continued its attacks throughout 1766. But its mode of operation had changed: it seemed less enterprising and much more cautious, as revealed by various correspondence, including that of Canon Ollier, parish priest of Lorcières, to Étienne Lafont.

At the beginning of 1767, the attacks experienced a slight lull, but they resumed in the spring. The populace no longer knew what to do, except to pray. Pilgrimages were increasing, mainly to Notre-Dame-de-Beaulieu and Notre-Dame-d'Estours. On 18 June, it was reported to the Marquis d'Apcher that the beast had been seen the day before in the parishes of Nozeyrolles and Desges. In the latter, in the village of Lesbinières, it allegedly killed 19-year-old Jeanne Bastide.

Killing by Jean Chastel


The killing of the creature that eventually marked the end of the attacks is credited to a local hunter named Jean Chastel, who shot it at the slopes of Mont Mouchet (now called la Sogne d'Auvers) during a hunt organised by the Marquis d'Apchier on 19 June 1767. In 1889, Abbot Pourcher told the edifying oral tradition which said that the pious hero Chastel shot the creature after reciting his prayers but the historical accounts do not report any such thing. The story about the large-caliber bullets, home-made with Virgin Mary's medals, is a literary invention by the French writer Henri Pourrat.

The body was then loaded onto a horse and brought to the Château de Besque of the Marquis d'Apchier, located in Charraix, where it was necropsied by Dr. Boulanger, a surgeon at Saugues. Dr. Boulanger's post-mortem report was transcribed by the royal notary Roch Étienne Marin and is known as the "Marin Report" on the beast; the results of the examination were consistent with a large wolf or wolf-dog, but the remains were incomplete by the time Boulanger acquired them, precluding conclusive identification of the animal. The beast was then exhibited at the château, where the Marquis d'Apcher lavishly received crowds, which thronged to see the remains. Numerous testimonies from victims of attacks enriched the Marin Report. The beast stayed in Besque for a dozen days.

Fate of the remains


The Marquis d'Apcher instructed a servant named Gibert to take the beast to Versailles to show it to the king. According to an oral tradition reported by Abbot Pourcher and repeated by several authors, Jean Chastel would have been on the trip, but Louis XV would have disdainfully rejected him because the remains, summarily stuffed by an apothecary who had contented himself with replacing the entrails with straw, gave off a stench that the heat made even more unbearable. However, this version is called into question by the testimony of the servant of the Marquis d'Apcher, collected in 1809: "Gibert finally arrived in Paris, went to stay at the hôtel particulier of Mr. de la Rochefoucault to whom he at the same time gave a letter in which Mr. d'Apchier begged the lord to inform the king of the happy deliverance of the monster (...) The king was at Compiègne at the time and, according to the news he was told, he gave orders to Mr. de Buffonto to visit and examine this animal. This naturalist, in spite of the dilapidation to which the worms had reduced it and the fall of all the hairs, following the heat of the end of July and the beginning of August, in spite of still the bad odor which it gave off, after a serious examination, judged that it was only a big wolf (...) As soon as Mr. de Buffon had made the examination of this animal, Gibert hastened to have it buried because of its great stench and he said he had been so inconvenienced by it that he was sick and bedridden for more than 15 days in Paris. He suffered from this disease for more than 6 years and he even attributed to this bad smell that he breathed for so long the poor health he has always been burdened with since that time."

It emerges that Jean Chastel did not accompany Gibert to Paris. Likewise, the servant never presented the remains of the beast to the court of Louis XV. Finally, Buffon left no document on this subject. Neither kept in the collections of the Jardin du Roi in Paris, nor buried in Marly or Versailles, the beast was probably buried in the garden of the private mansion of Louis Alexandre de La Rochefoucauld, a gentleman sharing a distant common ancestor with the Marquis of Apcher. The hotel of La Rochefoucauld, located on the Rue de Seine, would be demolished in 1825.

The attacks in Gévaudan ceased definitively. The authorities of the diocese granted rewards to the hunters: Jean Chastel received 72 livres on 9 September; Jean Terrisse received 78 livres on 17 September; the hunters who accompanied them shared 312 livres on 3 May 1768.

Morphology


Various questions about the nature of the Beast of Gévaudan have aroused interest and contributed to the enthusiasm for its history. Descriptions of the time vary, and reports may have been greatly exaggerated, owing to public hysteria. In terms of morphology, although none of the killed animals have been preserved, the beast was generally described as a wolf-like canine with a tall, lean frame capable of taking great strides. It was said to be the size of a calf, a cow, or, in some cases, a horse. It had an elongated head similar to that of a greyhound, with a flattened snout, pointed ears, and a wide mouth sitting atop a broad chest. The beast's tail was also reported to have been notably longer than a wolf's, with a prominent tuft at the end. The beast's fur was described as tawny or russet in colour but its back was streaked with black, and a white heart-shaped pattern was noted on its underbelly.

Behaviour
Several tales spoke of the beast's invulnerability. Indeed, hit by the bullets of reputedly skilled shooters, the beast would have risen each time. Testimonies attributed to the beast a gift of ubiquity. In a very short interval of time, it would have been seen in places several kilometres away. However, in many cases, these distances could be covered by a single animal. Two of the beast's most singular traits were its familiarity and his boldness. At least until François Antoine's departure, it did not seem to fear man. When it encountered resistance, it would move "40 paces" away, sometimes sitting on its hindquarters for a few moments and, if not pursued, would come back to the charge. Then it would move away at a walk or a short trot. Several victims were attacked in the middle of villages and most of the testimonies related to attacks during the day. Finally, by showing a relentlessness that did not always seem dictated by hunger, the beast showed an astonishing aggressiveness. In addition, its unusual agility allowed it to jump over walls that a dog could not cross.

The "Marin Report"
On 20 June 1767, the day after the death of the animal killed by Jean Chastel, the royal notary Roch Étienne Marin wrote an autopsy report at the Marquis d'Apcher's Château de Besque in Charraix. Preserved in the French National Archives, this memoir was discovered in 1952 by the historian Élise Seguin. It provides precise information on "This animal which seemed to us to be a wolf; But extraordinary and very different by its figure and its proportions from the wolves that one sees in this country."

The report also details the dental formula. The upper jaw consists of 20 teeth: 6 incisors, 2 canines and 12 molars; the lower jaw has 22: 6 incisors, 2 canines and 14 molars. This likely points to a canid. The document also describes the animal's wounds and scars. Finally, it includes the testimonies of several people who recognised it.

Hypotheses


According to modern scholars, public hysteria at the time of the attacks contributed to widespread myths that supernatural beasts roamed Gévaudan, but deaths attributed to a beast were more likely the work of a number of wolves or packs of wolves.

Attacks by wolves were a very serious problem during the era, not only in France but throughout Europe, with thousands of deaths attributed to wolves in the 18th century alone. In the spring of 1765, in the midst of the Gévaudan hysteria, an unrelated series of attacks occurred near the commune of Soissons, northeast of Paris, when an individual wolf killed at least four people over a period of two days before being tracked and killed by a man armed with a pitchfork. Such incidents were fairly typical in rural parts of both Western Europe and Central Europe.

The Marin Report describes the creature as a wolf of unusually large proportions: "This animal which seemed to us to be a wolf; But extraordinary and very different by its figure and its proportions from the wolves that one sees in this country. This is what we have certified by more than three hundred people from all around who came to see it."

Despite the widely held interpretation based on most of the historical research that the beast was a wolf or another wild canid, several alternative theories have been proposed; some think a lion (namely a subadult male) escaped from a menagerie, due to the size and some descriptions being more similar to a lion than a wolf. Others consider an escaped striped hyena, due to some sketches of the beast describing it as such. Another theory is that a large feral dog or wolfdog was responsible, since some sightings were of an animal that looked similar to a wolf, but was not one. In a 2021 talk by François-Louis Pelissier, based on the described appearance of the animal and specific details of behaviour and what can be inferred about historical distribution, he argued that beast encounters could most likely be blamed on the Italian wolf Canis lupus italicus.

Cultural legacy

 * Brotherhood of the Wolf (2001), directed by Christophe Gans, is an action film based on the legend. In the film, the Beast is a lion dressed up in armor to mask its identity.
 * Netflix will make a feature film produced by Blumhouse Productions.
 * The Cursed, a 2022 movie set in late-19th-century France, features the beast as a gypsy curse placed on a French village.
 * German power metal Powerwolf released in 2022 a single titled Bete de Gevaudan.
 * MTV series Teen Wolf (2011 TV series) featured La Bete du Gévaudan as the primary antagonist in the second part of its fifth season, with the episode 'Maid of Gevaudan' retelling the original legend. It was first mentioned in the season 1 episode 'Magic Bullet' linking the legend to the Argent family, which is later explained in the fifth season.