The Beast of Gévaudan outlived the king’s wolf

On 25 October 1765 the Gazette de France told its readers that the Gévaudan was safe. Nobody had been attacked since François Antoine, the king’s gunbearer, shot a large wolf on 20 September, and the paper drew the obvious conclusion.⁶

Five months later, on 24 March 1766, the same paper ran four lines passed on from Avignon: a “nouvelle bête féroce” had appeared in the Gévaudan and had already devoured and wounded several people.⁷ The killing went on for another fifteen months.

The Courrier d’Avignon had printed a fuller report on 11 March, from letters written in the Gévaudan on 17 February. A beast had reappeared at the end of December and attacked two girls of thirteen or fourteen minding cows at Juillanges, near Le Malzieu. It carried one of them into a wood, and the next day only her arms were found.⁸ The paper could not say what had happened:

Three kinds of paper

This article draws on three sorts of document, and they don’t carry the same weight.

The first is the press. The Gazette de France printed letters and reports that reached Paris, like the letter written at Marvejols on 1 November 1764 that gave the description above,⁹ or the item of March 1766 that came by way of Avignon.⁷ What it prints is secondhand: the Marvejols letter reports what witnesses said, and the Gazette ran it three weeks after it was written.⁹ The full Marvejols letter is on its own page, transcribed and translated.

The Courrier d’Avignon was quicker. On 16 November 1764, a week before the Gazette’s letter from Marvejols appeared, it passed on word from lower Languedoc of a beast that had eaten twenty-two people at Langogne and eight more near Mende. It was bigger than a dog, and “bien des gens la croyent une Hiene”, many took it for a hyena.¹²

The second is the parish registers, where priests recorded burials. The earliest victim historians have found is Jeanne Boulet, killed at the end of June 1764 and buried on 1 July.¹³ Her burial entry, as Moriceau transcribes it, says she was killed by “la bête féroce”.¹⁴ Moriceau built his whole list of victims from registers like hers,¹⁴ which makes his count the closest thing to a record of the dead.

The third is pamphlets and letters printed after the event, such as the letter from Auvergne that announced the kill of June 1767.¹⁵

This article leans on two historians who worked from these papers: Jean-Marc Moriceau, who compiled the victims from the registers,¹⁴ and Jay M. Smith, author of Monsters of the Gévaudan. Smith’s argument is that the province had a heavy wolf problem, and that the single beast was a creation of the press and the officials.⁴

The great hunt

The Gazette’s report of the hunt of 7 February 1765 is more specific than the legend it fed. Seventy-three parishes of the Gévaudan and thirty from Auvergne and the Rouergue sent men, about twenty thousand in all, led by the subdelegates, consuls and leading inhabitants.¹¹ Hunters from the parish of Prunières started the animal. It crossed the Truyère at a ford where the far bank, which the people of Malzieu were supposed to be guarding, turned out to be empty. The vicar of Prunières and ten of his parishioners went into the river after it, swam part of the way in February, and followed its tracks in the snow until it escaped into a large forest.¹¹

The disguises were real too. The Gazette of 18 February 1765 says Duhamel split his dragoons into squads and had several of them dressed “comme les femmes qui accompagnent les petits enfans lorsqu’ils vont garder les troupeaux”.¹⁰ Smith quotes Duhamel himself on the old skirts and women’s wigs.¹⁰

A wolf for the king

Antoine’s wolf was, by the Gazette’s own account, a wolf. The report of 4 October 1765 says the most experienced hunters judged it “un véritable loup qui n’avoit rien d’extraordinaire ni pour la taille ni pour la conformation”, a true wolf, nothing out of the ordinary in size or build.⁶ Its body reached Versailles on 1 October.⁶

The court had its ending. The Gévaudan did not. Smith counts 24 known deaths between December 1765 and June 1767,⁷ all of them after the wolf that was supposed to have done the killing.

Counting the dead

The counts differ mostly on which deaths each historian credits to “the beast” rather than to ordinary wolves, so the honest answer is a range: between about 80 and 113 people.³ The letter that announced Chastel’s kill in 1767 claims three hundred. Nobody who has counted the burials comes near that.

The ages are less disputed. Of the 79 dead whose age Moriceau could establish, 51 were between 8 and 15, and 63 were under 20.¹⁶² Every victim over 20 was a woman.² Smith found no adult man among the dead to the end of 1765.² Most were out minding small flocks when they were attacked.¹

Chastel’s shot

The attacks stopped after 19 June 1767, during a hunt led by the Marquis d’Apchier.¹⁵ The printed letter from Auvergne names the man who fired:

One detail doesn’t line up, and we can’t yet say why. The letter has d’Apchier’s party entering a wood it calls “la Tournelles”, above the village of Auvers, the night before; Smith places the kill in the wood of La Ténazeyre.¹⁵ They may be two names for one wood, or the letter may be vague about where the party ended up. We haven’t found a map or register that settles it.

Legend against record

What the animals were

Moriceau concludes that several predatory wolves did the killing, and F.-L. Pelissier, in a 2024 article, that the animals killed in 1765 and 1767 were canids, probably wolves.⁴

The one live dispute is whether any of them were part dog. A 2002 report of the Norwegian Institute for Nature Research says the animals were “believed to be hybrids” with large shepherd dogs, and in 1961 M. Balmelle published a document describing an animal born of a wolf and a bitch.⁵

The silver bullet

No document we have read puts a silver ball in Chastel’s gun. The earliest account of the shot is the letter from Auvergne quoted above, dated at Langeac less than three weeks later.¹⁵ Its title calls the animal “la vraie Bête féroce”, the true ferocious Beast, which reads like an answer to the court’s wolf of 1765.