Beast of Gévaudan

The historian Jay M. Smith, author of Monsters of the Gévaudan (Harvard University Press, 2011), puts the killings where the authorities eventually put them, on "a wolf, or a pack of wolves", and spends the book on why contemporaries refused to accept that answer. In the publisher's summary, the beast "was bound to be perceived as strange and anomalous because its ravages coincided with the emergence of modernity itself". Speaking to Smithsonian Magazine in 2017 he was blunter: "The best and most likely explanation is Gévaudan had a serious wolf infestation." The Public Domain Review quotes Graham Robb for the same picture of a region "infested with wolves", and the history page of a guesthouse at La Bastide-Puylaurent says that the majority of historians attribute the deaths to a pack of wolves. The record of the hunts points to more than one animal. In September 1765 François Antoine, the king's gun-bearer, shot a large wolf near the abbey of Chazes; according to the Public Domain Review he also killed the wolf's "similarly enormous mate and cub", and the attacks went on, with Smithsonian counting "a reported 30 to 35 fatalities" in the following eighteen months. National Geographic writes that more than a hundred wolves were killed in the Gévaudan between 1764 and 1767, and that by early 1765 the deaths attributed to the Beast were spread over 700 square miles, which "may indicate that there was more than one beast at work—perhaps even a pack". That is why the Public Domain Review describes Jean Chastel's kill of June 1767 as "the last of what had turned out to be the Beasts of the Gévaudan". The victims explain much of the toll: the first recognised one, Jeanne Boulet, was a fourteen-year-old girl killed while she watched her sheep in 1764; National Geographic notes that children often minded sheep or cattle by themselves and that many people in the region were "extremely poor and subsisted by herding livestock". The count of the dead depends on the source: the guesthouse page gives between 88 and 124, National Geographic "as many as 100", and Smithsonian and the Public Domain Review nearly 300 victims. Wolf attacks occurred throughout France in that period, and the historian Jean-Marc Moriceau, quoted by Smithsonian, estimates as many as 9,000 deaths from wolves in the country between the end of the sixteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth, and what set the Gévaudan apart, in Smithsonian's account, was the violence of the attacks and their toll together with the way the press told them. The extravagant descriptions came through that press. With political news mostly censored by the king, Smithsonian writes, François Morénas, editor of the Courrier d'Avignon, told the tale through faits divers, stories of everyday incidents in small villages, and his reportage turned the beast from a backwater calamity into a national affair; National Geographic adds that the end of the Seven Years' War in 1763 had left him short of news. A poster of 1764 reproduced by the Public Domain Review describes an animal "big as a donkey" with a "dark ridged stripe down the back" and a tail that "can knock you over", and the dragoon captain Jean-Baptiste Duhamel decided that it was a hybrid "the father of which is a lion". Between the pastures and the printed page the accounts passed through witnesses, officials and editors, over the nearly 500 kilometres (about 300 miles) that separate Mende from Paris. Other explanations remain in circulation: National Geographic reports that the biologist Karl-Hans Taake has argued for an escaped juvenile male lion and that most experts find the theory of a human killer using an animal too far-fetched; the werewolf survives in the rumour that Chastel loaded a silver bullet. The ending came from inside the region, since Chastel, a local farmer whom Antoine had earlier jailed for leading his men into a bog, shot the animal on 19 June 1767 during a hunt organised by a local nobleman, the Marquis d'Apcher, and Smithsonian notes that the hunters sent from outside had been "unfamiliar with the landscape and had trouble communicating with locals".