Beast of Gevaudan: France's First Reign of Terror & the Fear Caused by Werewolf Folklore 1764-1767

  Gevaudan is the historical name for France’s most sparsely populated region.  Located in the south central part of the country, Gevaudan is today part of the Haute-Loire area which is named after the Loire River and is known for its hilly terrain and wide woodland expanses.

Much like today, when the population of what once was named the county of Gevaudan, still numbers only around 75,000 residents, three hundred years ago the Gevaudan region was home to widely separated farming villages, shepherds and close-knit devoutly Catholic communities often prone to superstition and suspicion  of outsiders.

“The region is sublime...a remote isolated backwater where the forces of nature have not been fully tamed, where the forests indeed were enchanted,” wrote historian and folklorist Jay M. Smith when describing the Gevaudan region in his 2011 work entitled Monsters of the Gevaudan: The Making of the Beast published by Harvard University Press.

Between the years 1764 and 1767 the Gevaudan region of France witnessed a reign of terror that claimed over 300 innocent lives, terrified an entire nation and remains unsolved to this very day.

View of Gevaudan with Beast statue in foreground

In June of 1764 young Marie Jeanne Vallet was tending to her family’s small herd of cattle in a tiny clearing near the communal town of Langogne when she was frozen with terror as an enormous beast rushed at her coming from just beyond the tree line.

The beast first jumped through the air and clamped its jaws around the throat of one of the Vallet family cattle before being chased away by the rest of the herd.  Several times the wolf-like creature attacked but was repulsed each time by the herd.

Marie would later say that the animal she saw had, “reddish fur and a head like a large dog’s with small ears.”

But in the early summer of 1764 though, the attack on Marie Vallet was largely forgotten and hardly noticed.  After all, no one  had been killed, and ravenous wolves were no rarity to the agrarian residents of Gevaudan.

However, obviously not satisfied, the terrifying beast returned to the area around the town of Langogne only a few days later, and this time it's bloodlust was satisfied.

Fourteen year old Janne Boulet was walking down a dirt path in the wood’s outside Langogne and collecting wildflowers to bring home to her mother on a warm summer’s day when she had her encounter with the Beast of Gevaudan.  When a search party found Janne Boulet that evening all they found was a puddle of blood, her bonnet, and the basket of wildflowers she had been carrying.

Attacks by the Beast of Gevaudan continued all through the summer and fall of 1764.  Farmers working alone in fields would simply vanish, or the bodies of children that had gone out to play would be discovered later that night as bloody mauled torsos lying by the roadside.

It seemed as if this Beast, what most believed to be a wolf, acted with some premeditated nearly supernatural intelligence.  Those who found the mauled bodies at the scenes of the attacks noted how the surrounding trees and foliage were undisturbed.  There were no footprints, sometimes throats would be torn out which was consistent with wolf attacks in the area, but at other times, victim’s of the Beast of Gevaudan appeared to be neatly decapitated with their heads cut clean off and completely missing.

Soon, fear gripped the region.  Word spread of the frequent attacks through the burgeoning pamphlet press of pre-revolutionary France and residents of the Gevaudan region, fearing that something supernatural might be at work in their midst, something more sinister than simply ravenous wolves, locked themselves in their homes and let their field’s grow fallow.

As the attacks continued into 1765 theories about the Beast of Gevaudan spread.  Many soon became convinced that the Beast was a half-man half-wolf creature, a werewolf, which came out as a wolf at night before turning back into a man at dawn and hiding among the populace during daylight hours.

Clergy in Gevaudan spoke in their homilies of how the Beast was a scourge sent from Satan that had been visited upon the citizens of France as a punishment for the nation’s lack of patriotism during the Seven Years War of 1754-63.

During 1765 almost all travel and commerce in the southern counties of France halted as fears of the possibly supernatural monster grew.  After a boy of only twelve named Jacques Portefaix supposedly fought off an attack by the Beast of Gevaudan with a sharpened hiking stick and described the creature as being larger than any wolf he had ever seen, and as having glowing red eyes, King Louis XVI took notice of the situation.

Fearing how much damage worry over attacks by the “supposedly” supernatural Beast of Gevaudan may do to the region’s economy, King Louis XVI vowed that the French government would hunt down the Beast and put an end to the gruesome attacks once and for all.

In February 1765 the King dispatched a group of professional wolf hunters to the Gevaudan region to track down the Beast and to put the local population at ease.  It was the belief of the King and his experts that a large Eurasian, or perhaps a pack of large Eurasian grey wolves was to blame for the attacks, and he intended to dispel all talk of a supernatural terror once and for all.

Over the course of the next several month’s the King’s hunters killed hundreds of wolves, but as the wolf body count rose, so did attacks by the now mythic Beast of Gevaudan.  Fear grew and talk of supernatural werewolves increased.

No longer are even King Louis XVI’s own hunter’s sure that what they are dealing with is, in fact, a wolf.

Jean Charles Lafont from Normandy, aged 71 years at the time, France’s most prolific wolf hunter who claimed to have killed over 1,200 wolves in his lifetime, had a run in with what he said was an animal, “with a snout somewhat like a calf’s, and  very long hair which would indicate to me a hyena.”

Lafont was unable to shoot the Beast due to its speed, but it was Lafont’s assertion that what he had seen more closely resembled a hyena than a wolf, that first generated the second fascinating theory behind the nature of the Beast of Gevaudan that took off among members of the French pamphlet press.

This theory asserted that the Beast of Gevaudan was a prehistoric creature, a sort of cryptid, that had somehow survived extinction from long ago and was now terrorizing residents of the Gevaudan region.  As far fetched as this may have sounded at the time, today we know that a prehistoric large small headed hyena called the Pachycrocuta once roamed eastern Africa in large numbers.  Is it possible that a small group of Pachycrocuta may have survived extinction and went on a killing spree in the Gevaudan region of France in the middle of the 1700’s?  Anything is possible, but if that was the case--Why did the killings spontaneously begin in the summer of 1764 and then almost just as suddenly end less than three years later?

Public hysteria, and a French press which could for the first time in history spread information (often false) quickly undoubtedly combined with the insular, impressionable superstitious nature of the residents of Gevaudan to help create the perfect storm of rumor and speculation when it came to werewolves.

In French literature the first mention of werewolves dates back to around the year 1200  and a poem entitled Bisclavret.  In Bisclavret the young wife of a noble Baron questions her husband about why he disappears for three days out of every week.  When the husband replies that he must disappear into the woods for three days each week to turn into a werewolf-like creature the wife becomes terrified and leaves her husband for another man.  In the form of a werewolf, the Baron tracks down his now ex-wife and bites off her nose (or something to that effect) and regains human form permanently once her treachery is avenged by this act of mutilation.

Anyway, the point is, that werewolves have a long and almost heroic tradition in French folklore.  During the 18th century belief in werewolves was almost ingrained in the rural French psyche and as attacks continued in the Gevaudan region in the 1760’s it became, almost as if, the population of the region began to root for the wolf!

Even after Francois Antoine, personal hunter to King Louis XVI, shot and killed an enormous six foot long one-hundred thirty pound grey wolf in September 1765 in the forest outside Langogne and the King had the body of the wolf stuffed and mounted for all to see outside his court at the palace city of Versailles--bloody attacks by the legendary Beast of Gevaudan continued for over another year and a half!  Between September 1765 and February 1767 the Beast would go on to claim an additional 35-40 victims.

Slain wolf on display at Versailles 1765

Folklorist and historian Jay M. Smith who has written the authoritative modern study on the subject called Monsters of the Gevaudan: Making of the Beast stated that, “the best and most likely explanation (for the attacks) is that Gevaudan had a serious wolf infestation,” where he believes that not just one, but many extremely large grey wolves, were praying on the local human population at once during a time of drought and unusually cold summer weather in the 1760’s.  It is estimated that in the three hundred years between 1500 and 1800 France may have seen as many as 10,000 fatal wolf attacks on humans, so that, to have a particularly high number concentrated in one specific decade is not all that unusual.

Still, it is strange that France’s most sparsely populated region would have accounted for the nation’s highest number of fatalities caused by wolf attacks at any given time.  

Some have proposed that a serial killer stalked the woodlands of Gevaudan and that his actions were attributed to werewolves by a fearful population that turned a blind eye to the true evil that lurked in their midst. Instead, the people of Gevaudan may have  chosen to look to the legends and folklore of their past to try and explain an ungodly and heinous crime that was occurring right before their eyes the true nature of which was too evil for anyone to face.

Chances are we may never know the full truth about what happened in the Gevaudan region of southern France so long ago.  Perhaps it all was, simply, just an infestation of wolves gone out of control, maybe it was supernatural, or maybe it was just humanity’s own evil visited upon itself.