What happened
Gévaudan was a poor, high, thinly populated district of the Margeride mountains, now mostly within the Lozère département. Its people grazed cattle and sheep on open pasture, and the work of watching the herds fell largely to children and young women. In the early summer of 1764 a girl tending cattle was attacked by an animal she described as like a wolf but not a wolf; her herd drove it off. On June 30, 1764, a 14-year-old shepherdess named Jeanne Boulet was killed. Hers is the first death in the record, and it was followed by dozens more over the next three years.
The pattern was consistent. The attacker went for the head and throat, often of a lone child or woman in open country, and sometimes carried off or partly ate its victims. Survivors described a large reddish animal with a dark stripe down its back, a broad chest and a long tail. Estimates of the toll vary because parish registers are incomplete; a widely cited 1987 count arrived at about 210 attacks, with 113 dead and 49 injured, while most popular accounts settle for roughly a hundred killed.
The investigation
The provincial authorities first turned to Captain Jean-Baptiste Duhamel of the Clermont-Prince dragoons, who in the autumn of 1764 organized enormous battues involving thousands of peasants, and at one point had soldiers dress as women to lure the animal. The beast was shot at and wounded more than once but always escaped. In early 1765 Louis XV took a personal interest; he sent Jean-Charles d’Enneval, a professional wolf hunter from Normandy, and his son, with bloodhounds, and offered a bounty of thousands of livres. The d’Ennevals were dismissed in June 1765 after months of failure.
Their replacement was François Antoine, the king’s gunbearer. On September 20 or 21, 1765, near the abbey of Chazes, Antoine and his party shot an exceptionally large grey wolf, around 60 kilograms. Several survivors were said to have identified scars on it, the carcass was stuffed and sent to court, and Antoine returned to Versailles with rewards and titles. The crown considered the matter finished. In December the killings began again, and the court, having declared victory, largely ignored them. For the next year and a half the people of Gévaudan were on their own, apart from local nobles such as the young Marquis d’Apcher, who kept organizing hunts.
On June 19, 1767, during one of the marquis’s hunts on the slopes of Mont Mouchet, a local farmer and innkeeper named Jean Chastel shot a large animal at a place now called La Sogne d’Auvers. A royal notary, Roch Étienne Marin, examined the carcass the next day and recorded an animal that looked like a wolf but with unusual proportions and coloring; its stomach was reported to contain human remains. After that day the attacks stopped. Later legend added that Chastel had loaded his gun with blessed silver bullets, a detail that appears nowhere in the contemporary documents.
The explanations
The simplest explanation is wolves. Wolves were common in the region, attacks on people by wolves were a documented hazard of rural France in the period, and two very large wolves were in fact killed. The historian Jay M. Smith, in Monsters of the Gévaudan (2011), argues that the district suffered an unusually severe wolf problem, that the killings were the work of several animals rather than one, and that the figure of a single monster was built by newspapers, local clergy and courtiers who each had reasons to make the story bigger. The main objection to a plain wolf theory is the sheer number and ferocity of the attacks, which exceed what wolves normally do.
Other candidates have been proposed to fit the eyewitness descriptions. Duhamel himself suspected a big cat. The biologist Karl-Hans Taake has argued for an escaped young male lion, pointing to the dark dorsal line and bristling neck hair described by witnesses. Others have suggested a striped hyena from a traveling menagerie, a very large dog or wolf-dog hybrid, and, in the darkest version, a human killer who used a trained animal to cover his crimes. The animal Chastel killed was not preserved, and nothing survives that could be examined today, so none of these ideas can be tested.
Where it stands
That the Beast of Gévaudan killed people is not in doubt; the parish burials, the royal correspondence and the hunting reports all survive. What is unresolved is the identity of the killer or killers. The weight of modern historical opinion favors wolves, magnified by fear and by Europe’s first press sensation, with the exotic alternatives kept alive by witness descriptions that do not quite fit a wolf. The region now trades on the story, and a memorial stone to Chastel was raised at La Besseyre-Saint-Mary in 1995, but the question of what was really in the hills remains open.