Between 1764 and 1767, a series of terrifying attacks on people, mostly children, women and young shepherds, struck the former province of Gévaudan in the mountains of south-central France. The killer, known as “la Bête,” was described as an enormous wolf-like animal. Louis XV sent soldiers and his own huntsmen, and newspapers across Europe followed the story. One of the best-documented episodes in this index, the Beast of Gévaudan was very real: people died. The question historians still debate is what killed them.[1][2]
| Period | 30 June 1764 – 19 June 1767 |
|---|---|
| Region | Gévaudan, in the Margeride mountains (today Lozère and part of Haute-Loire) |
| Victims | A 1987 study counted 210 attacks, 113 deaths and 49 injuries; other estimates are lower |
| Described as | A large wolf-like animal |
| Killed | A large wolf, by François Antoine (September 1765); a second animal, by Jean Chastel (June 1767) |
| Most likely explanation | One or more large wolves, possibly wolf-dog hybrids |
The attacks begin
The first recorded victim was Jeanne Boulet, aged fourteen, killed near Langogne on 30 June 1764. Her burial record says she was killed by “the ferocious beast.” Over the following months the attacks multiplied. The animal was notable for attacking people, especially those alone in the fields.[1]
The numbers vary between sources. One 1987 study counted 210 attacks, with 113 deaths and 49 injuries, while other historians give somewhat lower totals of between 60 and 100 deaths.[1]
Remarkable episodes
- 12 January 1765. A group of children led by Jacques Portefaix drove off the Beast by staying together and fighting back. Louis XV rewarded them.[1][2]
- 11 August 1765. Marie-Jeanne Vallet wounded the Beast with a spear at Paulhac, and was later called the “Maid of Gévaudan.”[1]
The king’s hunters
The crisis became a matter of royal prestige. A captain of dragoons named Duhamel organized large hunts in early 1765 without success. The king then sent two professional wolf hunters, the d’Enneval father and son, who arrived in February 1765 with a pack of bloodhounds. They too failed and were replaced in June 1765.[1]
Next came François Antoine, the king’s personal gun-bearer. On 20 or 21 September 1765 he killed a very large grey wolf near the abbey of Chazes. It was declared to be the Beast, stuffed and sent to Versailles, and Antoine was richly rewarded.[1]
The wolf of Chazes
Antoine’s animal, sometimes called the wolf of Chazes, was measured before it was sent away. It stood about 80 cm at the shoulder, was about 1.7 meters long and weighed around 60 kg, very large for a wolf. Antoine wrote that he had never seen a wolf to compare with it. Several survivors of attacks, including Marie-Jeanne Vallet and her sister, were brought to see it and identified scars on the body from wounds they said they had given the Beast. The carcass was taken to Clermont-Ferrand to be stuffed and was exhibited in the king’s gardens at Versailles from 1 October 1765. Antoine received more than 9,000 livres and a string of honors.[1]
The official story ended there: the Beast was dead, and the king’s man had killed it. When attacks resumed only a few months later, the royal government had little interest in reopening the case, and the second phase of killings was left largely to local hunters.[1][3]
The second Beast
The attacks resumed in December 1765 and continued into 1767. On 19 June 1767, during a hunt organized by the local Marquis d’Apcher on Mont Mouchet, a local hunter named Jean Chastel shot an animal that ended the attacks. A notary’s report described a canid-like animal with unusual proportions, but the remains were too poorly preserved for a firm identification.[1]
The Marin report
The best evidence about the second animal is a notarial report written on 20 June 1767 by the royal notary Roch Étienne Marin, after a surgeon named Boulanger examined the carcass at the Château de Besque. The document was rediscovered in the French National Archives in 1952. It describes an animal that seemed to be a wolf but was “extraordinary and very different by its figure and its proportions” from local wolves. The tooth count recorded in the report, 20 in the upper jaw and 22 in the lower, matches a canid rather than a cat or hyena.[1]
The rewards tell their own story. Chastel received 72 livres from the diocese, a tiny sum compared with Antoine’s, and the other hunters shared 312 livres. The body was displayed locally for about twelve days and then, by various accounts, either rejected at Versailles because of its smell or examined in Paris and buried. It has not survived.[1]
The popular story that Chastel used silver bullets blessed by a priest is a twentieth-century literary invention, introduced by the writer Henri Pourrat.[1][2]
A media sensation
The Beast was one of the first great news stories of the European press. Papers such as the Courrier d’Avignon reported each new attack, printed engravings of an often fantastic monster, and by April 1765 were openly mocking the royal government for failing to deal with what they portrayed as a mere animal. English papers joined in. Jay M. Smith argues that this coverage, combined with the king’s personal investment in the hunt, turned a cluster of local tragedies into a single national “Beast.” Every death in the region came to be attributed to it, and the creature in the engravings grew more monstrous as the hunt failed.[1][3]
Why wolves attacked people then
Modern readers often find it hard to believe wolves could kill so many people, but historical records show that wolf attacks were a real danger in early modern France. The historian Jean-Marc Moriceau, who has spent years compiling parish records, has documented thousands of people killed by wolves in France between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. Some deaths came from rabid wolves, which bite indiscriminately, but many were predatory attacks.[4]
A 2002 review of wolf attacks on humans by the Norwegian Institute for Nature Research, led by John Linnell, found a clear pattern in predatory attacks across Europe and Asia: the victims were overwhelmingly children and young people, often herding livestock alone in open country, in landscapes where wild prey had been depleted and wolves had become used to people. Gévaudan in the 1760s fits that pattern closely. It was a poor, upland region of scattered farms, where children and young women spent long days alone with sheep and cattle.[5]
What was the Beast?
- Wolves. The scholarly consensus is that the killings were carried out by one or more large wolves, possibly with some killings by different animals. Wolf attacks on people were a recognized danger in eighteenth-century France.[1][3]
- Wolf-dog hybrids. The unusual coloring and size reported by witnesses could fit a hybrid between a wolf and a large dog.[1]
- An escaped exotic animal. Writers have suggested an escaped lion or a striped hyena, and even a maned wolf. There is no evidence that any such animal was present.[1]
- Mass panic. The historian Jay M. Smith has shown how newspapers, royal politics and public fear turned a run of wolf attacks into a national sensation, and how every attack in the region came to be credited to a single monstrous “Beast.”[3]
The Beast has had a long afterlife on screen. Christophe Gans’s 2001 film Brotherhood of the Wolf turned it into an armored lion controlled by a conspiracy, a version that owes more to cinema than to the archives. In 2016 the zoologist Karl-Hans Taake argued for an escaped exotic animal, but most historians continue to favor wolves.[1]
Today the Beast remains a celebrated part of the region’s identity, with a museum in Saugues, statues and a long life in film and fiction. For another wolf legend, see the Beast of Bray Road.
References
- “Beast of Gévaudan,” Wikipedia, citing the Archives départementales, M. Louis (2006), Mazel and Garcin (2008), J.-M. Moriceau (2008), J. Crouzet (2001) and others.
- “The Beast of Gévaudan,” Smithsonian Magazine, as cited in Wikipedia.
- Jay M. Smith, Monsters of the Gévaudan: The Making of a Beast (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011).
- Jean-Marc Moriceau, Histoire du méchant loup: 3000 attaques sur l’homme en France, XVe–XXe siècle (Paris: Fayard, 2007); and La bête du Gévaudan, 1764–1767 (Paris: Larousse, 2008).
- J. D. C. Linnell et al., The fear of wolves: A review of wolf attacks on humans, NINA Oppdragsmelding 731 (Trondheim: Norwegian Institute for Nature Research, 2002).
Correction note (October 2026): This entry was rewritten from historical sources, replacing an earlier general description that described the Beast as “as tall as a horse.” The illustration above is an artistic impression.