In the summer of 1764, something began hunting people in the remote countryside of south-central France. The old province of Gévaudan was a rugged place of mountains, dense forests, isolated farms and scattered villages. Today, much of the region falls within Lozère and Haute-Loire. Wolves were hardly unknown there. Shepherds and farmers lived alongside them and generally knew what they looked like and how they behaved, but according to terrified witnesses, the animal suddenly appearing around Gévaudan was different.
The first recorded encounter came in the early summer of 1764, when a young woman tending cattle near the Mercoire Forest was approached by an animal she reportedly described as resembling a wolf, but not quite being one. Her cattle rushed the creature and drove it away, possibly saving her life.
Then a child was killed.
On June 30, 1764, 14-year-old Jeanne Boulet was attacked near Les Hubacs while tending livestock. Her burial record attributed her death to a “ferocious beast.” Jeanne is generally considered the first officially recorded fatality associated with what would soon become known throughout France as La Bête du Gévaudan – the Beast of Gévaudan.
She would not be the last. More attacks followed. Children tending livestock disappeared or were found dead. Women travelling through the countryside were attacked. Survivors returned to their villages with terrifying descriptions of an animal that seemed strangely unlike the ordinary wolves they had known all their lives.
Descriptions weren’t completely consistent, but certain features appeared repeatedly. The Beast was said to be exceptionally large, with reddish or tawny colored fur, dark markings or stripes, a broad chest and an unusually long tail, sometimes described as ending in a tuft. Some witnesses thought its head and proportions looked unlike those of a normal wolf.
And it seemed more than willing to attack humans.
Women and children made up a large proportion of the reported victims. Estimates vary depending upon which historical records are counted, but roughly 100 deaths are commonly attributed to the Beast during its three-year reign of terror. Gévaudan descended into fear. People travelling between villages began carrying weapons. Shepherds watched the edges of the forests. Organized hunts were launched, but the creature repeatedly seemed to disappear into the rugged landscape.
Soon, the story escaped Gévaudan. Newspapers began reporting the attacks, and what had started as a terrifying local problem became a national sensation. France had only recently emerged humiliated from the Seven Years’ War, and King Louis XV’s government could hardly ignore reports that some mysterious animal was slaughtering his subjects while repeatedly evading attempts to kill it.
Even religion became intertwined with the terror. In December 1764, Gabriel-Florent de Choiseul-Beaupré, Bishop of Mende, called for prayers and penance. He interpreted the attacks in religious terms, portraying the Beast as a possible scourge permitted by God because of human sin.
For the scared villagers in the eighteenth century, the possibility that the creature represented something beyond an ordinary animal must have made an already terrifying situation considerably worse.
Yet some people fought back. One of the most famous confrontations occurred in January 1765. A group of children was attacked near Villaret. Rather than simply running, the children reportedly stayed together and fought the creature with sticks and improvised weapons. One of them, Jacques Portefaix, became celebrated for his courage, and Louis XV eventually rewarded the children.
Another extraordinary encounter came later that year. On August 11, 1765, 20-year-old Marie-Jeanne Vallet was crossing a stream with other women when the Beast reportedly attacked them. Marie-Jeanne was carrying a makeshift spear or bayonet attached to a pole.
Instead of fleeing, she drove it into the animal’s chest. The Beast escaped, apparently wounded. Blood was reportedly discovered on Marie-Jeanne’s weapon, and she became celebrated as the “Maid of Gévaudan.”
By then, the king had had enough. Louis XV sent his own experienced gunbearer and hunting official, François Antoine, to Gévaudan.
Antoine arrived during the summer of 1765 with professional hunters and began systematically searching the countryside. On September 20, his party encountered an exceptionally large wolf near the royal Abbey of Chazes.
Antoine shot it. The animal was killed, examined and eventually displayed as the Beast. Antoine received recognition and rewards, and for the royal court, the embarrassing affair was effectively over.
There was just one problem. People started dying again. After a period of relative quiet, attacks attributed to the Beast resumed.
The royal government had already celebrated its victory, however, and showed little enthusiasm for admitting that perhaps Antoine had killed the wrong animal – or merely one of several animals responsible for the attacks.
For the people of Gévaudan, the nightmare continued.
By 1767, the hunt had largely returned to local hands. A local nobleman, the Marquis d’Apcher, organized another hunt in June. Among the men participating was a local hunter named Jean Chastel.
On June 19, 1767, Chastel encountered an animal. He fired. The creature fell. And this time, something remarkable happened.
The attacks stopped.
The animal was taken to the Marquis d’Apcher’s Château de Besque, where it was examined. Royal notary Roch Étienne Marin produced a detailed report dated June 20, 1767—a document that survives in the French National Archives.
The report described the animal as apparently being a wolf, but an extraordinary one whose proportions differed considerably from wolves normally seen in the region. Its teeth, however, were consistent with a canid. People who had survived attacks reportedly viewed the carcass, and several identified it as the creature they had encountered.
That should have solved the mystery. It didn’t because more than 250 years later, people are still arguing about what the Beast of Gévaudan actually was.
The simplest explanation is also one of the strongest: wolves.
Wolf attacks on humans were a documented danger in historical France, particularly involving children. Historian Jay M. Smith has argued that Gévaudan may simply have suffered from a serious concentration of predatory wolves rather than a single supernatural or unknown animal.
This theory also solves one of the biggest problems with the traditional story. There may never have been one Beast.
Multiple wolves, or perhaps several unusually aggressive animals could explain why attacks occurred over such a large area and why killings continued after François Antoine shot his enormous wolf in 1765. But not everyone is satisfied with wolves.
Witness descriptions have led to speculation about an escaped exotic animal, particularly a lion or another large predator kept privately by someone wealthy enough to obtain unusual animals. A young or unusual lion could conceivably account for the tawny colouring, long tail and some descriptions of the creature’s movement.
Others have proposed a hyena.
Hyenas would certainly have appeared bizarre and unfamiliar to eighteenth-century French villagers, and their powerful jaws and unusual proportions might account for some descriptions.
There are also theories involving a wolf-dog hybrid or an unusually large dog deliberately trained to attack humans.
And then the theories become considerably darker.
Over the centuries, stories developed suggesting that Jean Chastel or someone associated with his family had raised or trained the Beast, perhaps explaining why it supposedly behaved unusually around humans. There is no solid historical evidence establishing that theory.
Likewise, one of the most famous elements of the legend – the claim that Chastel killed the Beast using silver bullets made from religious medals – appears to be a later embellishment rather than something supported by contemporary records.
Werewolf theories inevitably appeared as well.
A creature that attacked humans, resisted hunters, disappeared into forests and seemingly returned from the dead after the king had announced it killed was practically destined to become supernatural folklore.
But there is no evidence that anything supernatural occurred.
What makes the Beast of Gévaudan fascinating is that underneath all those legends lies a real historical mystery. Perhaps the answer is far less exotic than the legend. Maybe Gévaudan suffered through an extraordinary period in which several wolves learned that isolated humans, particularly children tending livestock, were vulnerable prey. Perhaps one unusually large or abnormal wolf was responsible for many attacks while ordinary wolves were blamed for others.
Maybe an escaped exotic predator contributed to the confusion or perhaps several different animals became combined in frightened memories, newspaper stories and centuries of retelling until they transformed into a single seemingly impossible monster.
We will probably never know.
The carcasses killed in 1765 and 1767 are long gone. There will be no modern DNA analysis capable of finally telling us exactly what those hunters shot. What remains are parish registers, government documents, newspaper accounts, eyewitness testimony and the names of people who died.
That last part is important. Behind one of Europe’s greatest monster legends were real communities living in genuine fear and real families burying their children.
The Beast of Gévaudan may have been a cryptid, but the terror that created the legend was very real and somewhere in the forests and mountains of eighteenth-century France, something was killing people.
More than two and a half centuries later, we still don’t know exactly what it was.
Sources: Smithsonian Magazine, French National Archives, Margeride en Gévaudan, Courtauld Institute of Art.
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