Creative History

  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 ...