The Man-Eater of Gévaudan

By Giovanni Todaro

This is a true story, happened in France in the XVIII century. It talks about the hunt, lasted for a good four years, against a mysterious anthropophagous beast, which plunged into terror the poor people of the Gévaudan and of the Auvergne, today Lozère. This is the story of the men in charge of killing what was simply nicknamed the Beast, of the strategies which were carried out, of the beatings that were made even with dozens of thousands of men and many packs of dogs, of the long posts in the wild mountains of that area with such a terrible climate, so described : “Nine months of winter, three months of hell”. In spite of the soldiers and the famous hunters sent by the King of France, the monstrous beast continued committing slaughters most of all of women and children, attacking hundreds of times and making at least 131 victims, many of which were devoured. Only after years of terror the Beast was finally killed and they were able to ascertain which species it belonged to.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Jul 20, 2013
• ISBN: 9781291510980

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The Maneater of Gevaudan

When the Serial Killer Is an Animal

Copyright by Giovanni Todaro - August 2013

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Translation by Irene Fontana

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When you think about so much in the past maybe you are already a little dead.

A recommendation…

Some of you, gentle leadership, could gather wrong conclusions about the wolf’s nature, from this book. Actually, this wonderful and smart animal is, or it is not, a lot of things. Most of all, it isn’t good and it isn’t bad. It is only a wolf, and that’s all, because Nature created it this way, and, be sure, for a reason.

Once, the wolves in Europe could become anthropophagous, it is true. But just in rare cases, remember that, and almost always it was man’s fault. Hunger is a bad counsellor, and this is true for us as well as for the wolves. A long ago there was a war between man and wolf, an age-long fight with no holds barred between two social species which ended to contend for the same spaces and even for the same food. At the end the wolf, by then reduced to few survivors scattered in unapproachable places, lost this war, but at that point, man unexpectedly pardoned it, protected it and even gave it reserved places, and placed the ancient wild preys, by then almost disappeared because of man, at their disposal, by reintroducing them in nature.

It was a great deed made by our species and it must not go lost. If wolves have a space on their own and enough wild preys, and if man is able to behave wisely , they will never see our species as a prey. In Italy wolves never extinct, nonetheless an attack against men, including also women and children hadn’t happened anymore for a good two centuries. Wolves will always run away in front of our species and, in consideration of the slaughter it was made of them, they have a good reason. On the other hand, the mountains could be covered with age-old woods, crossed by limpid streams and peopled with deer, wild boars and roe-bucks, but without the wolves – as well as without the otter, the bear, the lynx and many other species – they would result empty and lacking in something precious, fascinating and necessary.

We Italians, among the several merits we have, even if we are the first to criticize our people and the whole Country – and maybe this is another sign of greatness united to wise humbleness – were part of who didn’t exterminate the wolf, which, one way or the other, has always continued living here, allowing it not only to repopulate a large part of Italy but also to spread in the close nations, slowly re-colonizing the ancient lands. Just like France.

We hope our French friends will understand the value of this event too, now that the wolf is slowly returning to that Country and for some years it has been cautiously re-colonizing also the Lozère, which is the ancient Gévaudan at the centre of our story.

Because the war is now over.

Prologue

On the 8th September 1762, Barthélémy and Marie Yolle gave their son the responsibility of driving their little flock of sheep to the pasture, in an area in the parish of Laval, in Dauphiné, which was at that time a province in the south-eastern France, corresponding today to the present districts of Isère, Drome and Hautes-Alpes. At night, noticing that their son as well as their flock had not come home, the parents were obviously worried and the research was immediately organised. Easy to guess their torment when the child’s remains were found; he had been devoured in large part by a mysterious beast. It seemed the work of a wolf, but what astonished the most was that the beast had completely ignored the sheep – which had not a single scratch – throwing itself on the child only.

The abbot Raphael, curate of the parish of Laval in whose land the fact happened, had the occasion –we don’t know if in that occasion or afterwards- to see the beast and he described it this way: "of a very big wolf’s size, and its colour was a bit brighter than the one of the burned coffee, with a black haired stripe along its back, the stomach was dirty white coloured, it had a very big and hairy head, and a tail covered with hair like an ordinary wolf’s one, but longer and kept uprights at its end." Still according to the abbot Raphael, the same beast attacked a group of young shepherds on the 23rd September, and on the 5th October it killed and devoured Madeleine Bariol. Then, nothing more, or at least, we have no news about it today. The following year, on the 25th October 1763, the sixty year old woman Anne Taquet, Jean Brunat’s daughter, was coming back, at sunset, to the parish of Laval with the curate Raphael’s vestment, who had officiated at a service shortly before in the very Taquet’s house, where her husband, seriously ill, was. The woman’s throat was cut and she was torn to pieces by a beast, maybe the same one of the previous attacks. The scene was observed by two hidden children, who with understandable horror saw the animal feeding on the stomach and the limbs, then leaving with the unfortunate’s head, whose parts were found days later. The sorrow for her death speeded up her husband’s one.

Few days later, still in October, the one which seemed to be the same beast, crossed the border of Dauphiné, covered some dozens of kilometres towards South-East, went past, a hundred of metres far, a certain monsieur Darsac’s mansion, in Sainte-Agnès – spot of the then County of Nice, subjected to the Savoias’ Reign of Sardinia, and today part of the Alpes-Maritimes – and peacefully went through some flocks of sheep without attacking them and neither scaring them. This last detail seems strange because, even if it was a dog and not a wolf, the sheep should have been scared in front of a big unknown animal. Yet, it is supposable that the clearly disinterested attitude – as documented in similar cases also in other predator species close to their potential preys – was perceived by the sheep. The beast, though, turned to a fourteen year old shepherd, who saved himself only thanks to the help of some adults who were in the neighbourhood. Then, the animal crossed a stream with great ease and climbed the Saint-Marie-du-Mont mountain, opposite Sainte-Agnès, with remarkable agility, and there it attacked a fifteen year old shepherdess, who, though knocked down, had the readiness to tightly clutch with her arms the animal’s neck, at least succeeding in avoiding to be fanged in vital parts. She was promptly saved by some men too.

The question which must be asked is: was it the same beast which afterwards moved West to the Vivarais – today the Ardèche – to definitely settle North West in Gévaudan, in particular in the area between the Gévaudan and Auvergne? The animal’s description, the modalities of attack, even the age- when the Beast was finally killed it was about 7-8 years old, so it could have been the same- would make think so, while the hundreds of kilometres it would have covered, would seem actually a lot, completely faceable by a wolf though, as it is documented it happens because of the dispersion of the species. It sounds strange though, that this beast was able to cross far and wide, with impunity, a lot of areas crowded with wolves – notoriously very territorial animals, and which tend to kill the invading individuals – and at the same time that it hadn’t left, being already clearly anthropophagous, a victims’ trail along the way. But maybe the were other victims – only, we don’t know anything about them today – or these victims were ascribed to specimen of anthropophagous wolves, not very rare in Europe at that time, and that in France seemed to be particularly active. According to the aforesaid supposition, here are the displacements of the Beast.

From March 1764 in the Vivarais the news of the appearance of a mysterious anthropophagous beast, which was devastating the area, making several human victims, began to spread. The present lacking of sources about this fact – in most cases ignored by the researchers – lends itself to several considerations. First of all, the attacks against human beings by the so-called beasts – most likely always wolves – must have been, if not common, at least remarkable in the rural world of that period. And as almost the whole France was populated by dozens of thousands wolves, a part of which was also anthropophagous, there was the same problem in Vivarais too. Therefore, to put it bluntly, the killing of a number of people was not a newsworthy event, except for local people, being a basically predictable fact. In second place, at a certain point though, the number of attacks and victims must have exceeded the standard, so that it was specified that the problem continued until June, but still the authorities did not carry out that series of precautions which were instead taken, after the victim of the 30th June 1764, about whom we are going to talk later, by the authorities of the Gévaudan. Or maybe some enterprises were taken – whose dossiers went lost – which we don’t know anything about today. We could even think that the authorities of Vivarais, in the person of its representative, Lachadenède, had underestimated and ignored the problem, maybe because of laxity and personal incapacity, and that the whole thing was then obscured by the outcry given by the so-called Beast of the Gévaudan. Surely, the Beast’s victims’ computation begins from the 30th June 1764, but the determination showed by this beast in the first recorded attack makes clearly understand that it was not its first experience for sure. In short, the Beast must have already killed some human beings previously. On the other hand, this is confirmed by a letter written on the 27th September 1764 by Lachadenède and sent to the Superintendent of the Languedoc, Marie-Joseph-Emanuel from Guignard of Saint-Priest, with which he communicated "…for more than six months, a fierce beast wandering in our mountains in the Vivarais, near to the Gévaudan ones, has made the inhabitants of this district experience the effect of its voracity".

And only in that situation he asked Saint-Priest to grant also to the population of the Vivarais – as it was instead immediately decided by his colleague of the Gévaudan – the authorization to have armed beatings. In short, he began to move only in that moment. And he only vaguely mentions these beast’s victims. It does not seem a demonstration of great efficiency.

Could the responsible of the victims in the Vivarais, and then of the Gévaudan and Auvergne, have been the same beast which had made a slaughter in the Dauphiné and in the County of Nice? As I have mentioned before, it is possible, even from the point of view of the animal’s age, indeed it would be, at that time, 4-5 years old – so completely deadly and expert – because when it was finally pulled down, the autopsy demonstrated it was 7-8 years old. On the other hand, could it be another beast? Yes, it is possible. Or could it be the consequence of the attacks by several beasts scattered in the several districts? Yes, it is possible. In short, we will never know for sure the truth about this supposition. Sure, if it had always been the same animal, we would have to wonder the reason of this continuous moving in areas very far from each other, making a certain number of victims and then disappearing and beginning again its attacks where its arrival was not suspected. The wolves, for example, move a lot, but the really long ways are the ones some specimen instinctively do to search for new lands where to form a new pack. Their aim, in short, is the appropriation of a land. The Beast, except in the end of its life, showed instead to have not this aim at all. Its movements seem to be motivated only by the research of human preys and by the awareness, every time after a certain period of devastations, that it has to leave the area where it began to be quickly hunted. Is it possible that an animal can be so shrewd and smart?

Was maybe man, with his war activities and military expeditions to far away lands, leaving dead’s and dying men’s trails along the whole way, to create such beasts which had not the concept of territory as we mean it, anymore? Whose only land was the proximity with the human beings as privileged preys? Had they got a strange concept of moving territory ? We don’t know. But if it was so, it wouldn’t be that strange, indeed the Alsatians too have a very strong concept of moving territory, territory meant as the flock to protect wherever it is. It doesn’t matter the place, but the flock occupying that place. Did maybe the Beast develop the same behaviour? Only one thing is sure, which is that the victims of the so-called Beast of the Gévaudan were far more then the ones counted up to now.

The beginning of the nightmare

The first official Beast’s victim was Jeanne Boulet, a fourteen year old girl from the village of Hubacs, in the parish of Saint-Etienne-de-Lugdarès. She was leading her few animals to the pasture in the high glades of that mountainous area of Vivarais – which is the Ardèche today – on the border with Gévaudan, covered with gloomy and moist woods whose continuity was broken only by unhealthy swampy areas and broad grassy clearings. But soon the deeds of the terrible animal named the Beast, moved also to the Gévaudan, which is called Lozère today and which, still borders North-East with the Haute-Loire, North-West with the Cantal – both part of Auvergne – East with Ardèche, South-East with Gard and West with Aveyron. Jeanne Boulet spent her days alone up there, day-dreaming about we don’t know what, maybe about some boy she liked and who paid court to her down in Haubac or maybe even in Saint-Etienne. On the other hand, she would soon be fifteen and, according to the canons of that period, she was already ready to get married. With no doubt she hoped in a happy future, far away from the poverty of that area, where being able to eat milk and boiled chestnuts and maybe some potatoes three times a day, was already a hope from which the eternal hunger was banned. Poverty was so spread and oppressive not only in that area. In the whole Europe the situation was the same, because there were few rich people, while the indigents were the great part. This is the reason why, as there were lots of mouths to feed and that everyone had to do something to gain some daily food, even the seven or eight year old children were sent to graze the beasts in inhospitable and dangerous areas.

At that time in France there were about 26 million people, 18 millions of which were farmers and cattle raisers. Only the 33% of the land belonged to the little landowners, which were in total 11 millions, while the remaining 47% belonged to the nobility and the 20% to the clergy. On these lands were raised 2,700,000 oxen , 200,000 of which were butchered every year for the town use and 100,000 for the local needing, 400,000 force-fed oxen, annually and equally consumed between cities and countrysides, 4,000,000 cows, with an annual consume of 450,000 heads for the city and only 6,000 for the countrysides, 3,000,000 calves, 1,500,000 of which ended to be butchered every year in town and 1,200,000 of them were butchered in the country, 4,000,000 pigs, 440,000 of which supplied the cities and a good 2,000,000 the countrysides and finally 20,000,000 sheep, 3,750,000 were butchered every year for the towns and 1,500,00 for the countrysides.

Why did I gave you all these data? To make you understand three things before beginning our story; first of all the cattle raising in France was a strategic and fundamental activity. In second place that, in some areas, like the Gévaudan, it was the basic activity for the local economy. In third place, that the poor Jean Boulet was one of the several authorized personnel which gave life to the local economy. Therefore, the appearing of the Beast of the Gévaudan did not hit only the victims and their families, but caused a spread terror in the area, so that several shepherds reduced their activity, with a consequent shrinkage of the zootechnical production in an area already famous for its poverty and its villagers’ hard life. So much an animal, was it the Beast or a wolf, like the one which scared the Gévaudan for four years, could cause. So, the problem was not only human, but also social, economic and finally political.

Let’s go back to Jeanne Boulet and to her cows at the pasture. The girl must have felt, maybe, more confident than a few year old child left alone up there with the herds, as it was the normal procedure, but this did not make her more confident for sure, while she was waiting for another day to go by. In the area there were a lot of wolves and Jean knew well what the reality was. The wolf might suddenly come out from the thick woods and attack and kill not only the herds, but also the people, especially the women and the children. Not all the wolves used to do this, more than that, such a behaviour was quite rare, but one never knows, who knows? But the only thing one could hope for was that this didn’t happen, or in the worst of the suppositions, that it happened somewhere else and to someone else. Maybe Jeanne was thinking about this too, on that 30th June 1764. But that night she did not come back home and her family started worrying not seeing her coming, while the darkness was approaching. They looked for her in the high pastures, where she always used to led her herds, and then her body was found the following day. With no doubt she had been devoured by a beast. The miserable remains of the poor girl were buried that very day, on the 1st July 1764.

When the news spread, everyone thought about the probable killer. A strong and fierce animal. Not the bear, on the other hand very rare in that area, because it doesn’t attack man unless it is provoked and which, if hungry, would have easily taken one of her more nourishing cows (1). And neither the lynx, which does not attack man or cows. These animals still used to live on that mountains, higher, but nobody could remember attacks against people, unless the ones provoked by man himself. Only one beast remained, the most feared. The wolf. Most likely the girl’s family cursed that life and that poverty, which did not even allowed them to maintain a sheep dog, which would have surely protected the girl and the herds. It is a fact that Jeanne Boulet, up there, remained alone with the horror. And now that girl, who was for her relatives like an isolated rose blossom in a sea of woods and dark mountains, was not picked but torn away from life. And what remained of her, rested in the wet soil of Saint-Etienne cemetery. The Beast, this way will be called the animal which for years scared that huge mountainous area, probably had already made human victims, but not in a systematic way – or at least nobody knew or suspected it – and this is the reason why the toll begins from Jeanne Boulet. If it had already killed, the news did not spread among the population of the several districts, in periods and areas where the news spread next to nothing, the newspapers were rare and illiteracy was prevailing.

On the other hand at that time it wasn’t unthinkable at all being a victim of the wolves. Maybe it hadn’t killed, but I think so, nevertheless it had most likely tried to do it. In fact, some people linked up, wasn’t a girl attacked near Langogne, a place North of Saint-Etienne, about a month earlier? (2) Langogne was in the Gévaudan, that’s true, but it was few kilometres far from the Vivarais and Saint-Etienne-de-Lugdarès. And in the Vivarais, a land known to be infested by fierce wolves, from March to June hadn’t there been several devastations committed by a mysterious and fierce beast? Langogne was exactly that way and so, maybe, it was the same wolf which came from there. It happened on the first week of June, maybe on the 1st or the 3rd. A 8 year old shepherdess, who had led her cows to the pasture in the forest of Saint-Flour-de-Mercoire, was attacked by a huge beast suddenly come out from the woods. The attack was so quickly that the dogs accompanying the girl, evidently not big neither sheep dogs, immediately ran away. The beast threw itself against the shepherdess, but luckily the cows counterattacked. The cattle behaved in their typical way if in the zone there are some predators. In fact where the memories of the predators got lost, wolves or others, the cows tend to flee and in this way only the weakest ones and usually the calves remain at the enemy’s mercy, and the herd is not able to carry out an organized defence strategy. But if the predator is well known, the cows, as well as the pigs too, know how to behave and they gather in circle to protect the puppies.

The little girl was luckily considered, in that situation, like a calf by the cows which, by butts, kept the beast away, which on the other hand, must have known and must have been scared by that kind of reaction, so that it got closer with great caution. Its attempts though – it was indeed evident its prey to be the girl – were aimed to have the herd scattered, so it continued to turn around and make fake attempts to attack. The girl, we don’t know if by instinct or because she had realised it was the only way to try to save herself, in that commotion tried to keep herself near to the cows; yet the beast managed to slip through several times, luckily not enough, among the cattle, only succeeding in tearing the girl’s clothes. But the cows held on and refuted each attack (3). The young shepherdess of Saint-Flour-de-Mercoire, once returned to her village under the protection of her herds, during a certainly nightmare way, with the fear the beast could come back, told the episode under chock, specifying to have been assaulted not by an ordinary animal, but by "an enormous beast, with a very thick hair and paws furnished with long claws". The beast would be as big as a cow, with a very broad chest, a huge head, upright and short ears and a long snout. The tail was long and strangely thin and on its rump it had a black stripe from the top of the head to the end of the tail (4). She added that the animal was able to make jumps till 9 metres high! But the general opinion was that it must have been a wolf, maybe a very big one, which in a fairly scared young girl’s eyes must have looked like a gigantic monster. All of them though, agreed on one thing, that the shepherdess was still alive only thanks to a miracle and, far more concretely, thanks to her cows. Maybe that beast was the same one that less than a month later killed and devoured Jeanne Boulet.

Now the first question rises. What did the beast eat during that month, which is the period between the failed attack in the forest of Saint-Flour-de-Mercoire and the deadly one against Jeanne Boulet? In the area of the Central Massif and so also in the Gévaudan, the game, included the big one, was not lacking at all, but it was mostly owned by the nobility, which owned huge hunt reserves, where obviously the common people weren’t allowed to enter to hunt. Not only, in certain areas, deer, roe-bucks, and other ungulates, thanks to the total protection granted by the nobles, became so many to heavily damage the poor people’s crops, who were forbidden to react in any way. Obviously, the aforesaid protection didn’t applied to the nobles, the owners of the reserves, who, during the great beatings of that time, did real slaughters of game. The nobility tried in many ways to increase the number of wild animals, which were then pulled down just for fun. In France there had been, for centuries, a very strong and extremely complex hunting tradition. And thanks to this protection in some areas the ungulates, mostly deer, excessively increased, with a heavy damage for the cultivations and, all in all for the farmers.

This habit didn’t happen only in France, but in the whole Europe. Worthless were the protests and even the hungry people’s petitions. The farmers at that time, in most part of Europe, had often also other limitations, like the prohibition to build stone walls around the crops, or to exceed certain heights, all this to allow the deer to go feed on the harvests. Not only, it was in force the so-called hunt servants thanks to which each noble could organise hunt beatings on the farmers’ lands, even in the imminence of the harvests. This meant that a beating, with dozens of horsemen, beaters and packs of hounds, could destroy a year’s work of a farmer family in a few minutes. Sometimes this was a system adopted to force the little landowners to go away or to stay as wage-earning labourers. When the fields were properties of the nobles instead, the farmers worked on them according to a sort of lease which established that a large part of the production was due to the owners, who demanded all the agreed upon, had the harvest been trampled and destroyed or not, because of their elegant and great hunt beatings. These vexations were exasperating the poor people more and more. The list of all these abuses would result too long for this description. But we mustn’t, on the other hand, consider the masses as saint, because as soon as it had the chance, it carried out such a hunting pressure to completely depopulate broad European areas, and several animal species could survive thanks to the protected areas previously instituted and safeguarded by the nobility. Yet, the deer and the wild boar extinct in France in the XIX century and the roe-bucks became very rare. However the nobility’s contempt for the farmers’ interests and basically for the low people, wasn’t certainly one of the last causes of the hatred which later broke out in the French Revolution, happened little more than twenty years later the facts we’re narrating. In fact, in France, the feudal right to hunt fell only with the Revolution, in particular during the famous sitting of the Constituent Assembly, in the night of the 4th August 1789.

Let’s get back to our story and to the question we had made to ourselves. What did the beast eat during that month, in the period between the failed attack, in the forest of Saint-Flour-de-Mercoire and the deadly one against Jeanne Boulet? Yet, the Beast had to eat, and as in that period there were no human slaughters like the one then committed as far as we know, we have to assume it fed on game and pets, a thing absolutely evident also because among the all anthropophagous animals – whatever species they belonged to – which had lived in any continent or period, there were none eating only and exclusively human beings. It is strange though that a beast, which had demonstrated such a perseverance against young human victims, whom it purposely looked for, in almost thirty days didn’t at least run into the thousands of defenceless young shepherds scattered in the land. Maybe not all this beast’s victims-which was not certainly the only anthropophagous one in France in those years- were listed as such, because believed as simple disappearances of people or because they weren’t reported or because ascribed to common wolves. This last supposition may seem strange, but it is a fact that in that period being devoured by wolves was not so rare. In France every year these victims were between the 30 and the 50, and maybe far more.

However less than forty days after Jeanne Boulet’s killing, precisely on the 6th August, there was the second sure victim, Marianne Hébrard, from the village of Cellier, parish of Saint-Jean-la Fouillouse. So, for the first time, as far as we know, the Beast was killing in the Gévaudan. The attack happened in full daylight just out the built-up area, but clearly nobody noticed nothing. The little girl’s remains were buried the next day. The death certificate drafted by the curate Du Fayet, says, "During the year 1764, on the 7th August, in front of us the undersigned Prior Curate, in the church and parish cemetery, Marianne Hébrard from Collier was buried, who yesterday had the misfortune to be chocked and partially devoured by a fierce beast which has settled here and has been going around the village for some months. This incident, fatal to humanity arrived in full daylight at the doors of the village". But already on the day following the funeral, and precisely on the 8th August, there was the third verified victim, a fifteen year old girl, living in the village called Masméjean-d’Allier, parish of Puylaurent. I’m indicating the parish because at that time the territorial subdivision in commons didn’t exist.

The killing at Puylaurent – today it is the Bastide-Puylaurent – showed how the beast had moved West, far from the previous attack. The unlucky girl was attacked at about five p.m., while she was, with her sheep, on the grassy slope of a big valley. The flock spread around and its escape was noticed by three woodcutters, who were lower down, on the opposite side of the valley. These men, realising the situation, rushed up and with no doubt their arrival was perceived by the animal which, not seen, faded away. According to someone the girl, horrendously torn to pieces but still alive, had the time to tell them to have been attacked by "a horrible beast, half wolf and half tiger, with big claws and a long tail", while according to others she was found already dead, her corpse maimed in a big pool of blood.

Obviously the authorities immediately acted to solve the serious problem – and probably they were more effective than the Gévaudan’s ones about it – because the experience said that when a wolf, or whatever it was, became anthropophagous, a long period of slaughters would begin, which ended only with the beast’s death. Etienne Lafont, a sixty year old lawyer from Mende, which also held the position of Mayor of the Diocese of Mende, as well as Lieutenant of the Languedoc, so a kind of deputy-prefect, decided, with the mayors of the involved land, not only to undertake the prevention with a series of dispositions of public order, but also to report to the superiors and to ask for reinforcements. This is the reason why he sent an urgent letter to the Superintendent of the Languedoc, whose head office was in Montpellier, who sent it to the Central Government. Indeed, the first beatings to kill the Beast, in such a broad and difficult land, had been made by the gendarmes and by the quickly alerted farmers, but they got no success. The beast, and neither some wolf, whose killing was anyway desirable, was not tracked down. Every year a great number of them were killed, we know indeed that only during the period between the 10th March and the 12th April 1764 in Gévaudan 79 wolves were killed, a large part of them were puppies, a thing which gave the killers a prize, not negligible at all by the common people, of 6 francs for each adult wolf and 3 francs for each puppy.

Not that many hoped, anyway, in this kind of hunts. The beatings, mostly in the mountains, were really tiring and to get some result they had to be made by a lot of people, surely not by simple patrols of men. With so little force on field, the mysterious beast, and the wolves too, would flee a long before their presence was not assured, but even only suspected. On those steep hills and mountains covered with thick woods and pastures, the beast of the incredible agility, as well as the wolves, as fast as it, would climb it easily, while the men on foot would have to slowly and laboriously limp. In the meantime the mayors and the gendarmes began to consider the chance to officially start advising, yet with the clear intent of not spreading panic, a series of advice to the population, exhorting it to be more cautious, especially towards women and children. So, women and children were forbidden to go alone to graze the herds, they recommended to pay attention and, to the authorized hunters, to try to pull down the beast, sure to gain some lavish reward from the authorities. Moreover the price on the common wolves’ heads remained in force, and anyone who pulled down these evil beasts, was it the anthropophagous beast or simple male, female, or puppies wolves a few months old, giving their ears to the authorities, would immediately receive the decided prize.

All the documents about the Beast – this way it will be called, similarly to many others before and after – as the usual procedure, were drawn up in three copies and respectively sent to the Royal Gendarmerie and to the Military Governor of the Languedoc, the third copy remained to the Lieutenant. Besides, the latter wrote detailed reports which he sent to the Superintendent, who sent it to the concerned Minister if it was the case. Also the Lieutenants and the Superintendents of the bordering districts ended, in the case of the Beast, to exchange official communications of various kinds, especially for the planning of the interventions. Not only, the curates of the parishes drafted other documentation, like the death certificates – which, unlike the ones made in Italy in the same period, indicated particulars, dates, causes and statements of the witnesses, if there were any, and then they represent sources of great value for the historians – and they sent detailed correspondence with the bishops too. The documentation about the attacks of the so-called Beast, as we have just said, was then sent in a copy from the Intendent of the Languedoc to Jean-Baptiste de Morin, Earl of Moncan and Military Governor of the Languedoc and therefore responsible of that sphere, and to the concerned ministers of the government. But the Earl of Moncan didn’t wait for the answer, seeing the gravity of the situation and, having on the other hand the complete authority, ordered to the thirty-four year old Captain Major Jeanne Duhamel (5), commander of the Volunteers Dragon of Clermont, to take action. The dragons under his orders were four companies, quartered in Langogne and Pradelles, for a total, in that period, of 100 men, 93 of which were French and the others were foreigners enlisted in the corps, which was fully-fledged fit in the Army. Duhamel began to hunt the beast, but it was immediately evident the fact that being the barracks in Langogne, and so not in the area where the Beast acted – then moved further – the intervention times were excessive, as well as the chances of effective patrols.

The dragons, born in the XVII century as special infantry corps, moving on horses to then fight on foot, became during the same century a speciality of the cavalry and so furnished with a carbine, besides with a gun. The name would come from the mainly used weapon, a carbine or a short musket called dragon due to the smoke let out by the shot. They were weapons very similar, in model and calibre, to the ones of the rest of the infantry, but a little shorter and lighter to not block the horseman. The dragons were not organized in squadrons like the cavalry, but in companies like the infantry, from which indeed their officers came. The flexibility from being basically an infantry on horses, made them an effective weapon, especially if used for what we today would call the internal security to face the smuggling, the warfares and the civil disorders. A regiment of dragons was also less expensive to form and to maintain than a regiment of cavalry, even though, compared to the latter, the dragons were in disadvantageous conditions, therefore they constantly tried to improve their equestrian ability, their armaments, as well as their social status to their elder sister’s levels. From the second half of the XVIII century some regiments began to receive the denomination of light dragons, because they used to ride lighter and faster horses and used to bring light sabres. In short, they were quick and well-equipped, and this is the reason why the choice to send them to the Gévaudan seemed excellent. A curiosity, the dragons’ uniform – which included a metal helmet, though substituted during patrols by a more comfortable tricorn hat – was ochre coloured but some units had the red jacket, an expensive kind of tincture. Some commanders, richer than others, had them dyed red just because they had enough money to do it. In short, it was a status symbol.

There was a problem though, which is that the people of the area couldn’t stand the dragons at all. To understand the situation we should open a big bracket. At the beginning the dragons were, maybe and anyway just for a bit, welcomed because people were afraid of the Beast. But the atmosphere mustn’t have been one of the best, because to those poor bumpkins, the dragons represented the same authority and the same world of rich and noble people, first of all the king, which exploited them and hungered them in a terrible way. Besides those strangers, which were also soldiers, worse they were dragons, were harsh people, probably accustomed to force, and violent and intransigent about their role. They were there to kill this Beast, and they really tried to, with great sacrifices and determination, but probably thinking – until the beatings began and they tried the extraordinary difficulty of that hunt – that if it was all about to kill a deer or a wild boar, good to eat, those farmers would have succeeded with no doubt and they wouldn’t have needed their help. In short, the dragons thought that mob to be just a mass of cowards. Who was right it is difficult to say, and probably everyone and no one was. For sure, the pre-revolution French Army, included the dragons, was much far from the future napoleonic one’s efficiency and morality, had they to fight against beasts or other soldiers. Let’s figure out what was the situation like at the time of the Beast.

It was the Seven Years War, from 1756 to 1763, to point out the break-up of the French Army, which was in fact heavily defeated by the Prussian and the English ones. The decadence concerned the commands as well as the troops. For what concerned king Louis XV (1710-74), he ended to entrust the army to one of the favourites of madame de Pompadour – whose real name was Jeanne-Antoinette Poisson, Marquis of Pompadour, very famous and powerful Louis XV’s lover – who was the General Soubise, thanks to not exactly military merits. All the officials, on the other hand came from the nobility and a large part of them was more prone to the gentle court life than the difficulties and severities of the battle. The General Louis Antoine Henri de Bourbon-Condé, Earl of Clermont, at the beginning of 1758, in a report pointed out, scandalized, the dirt, disorganization and lacking of discipline and sense of duty among the officials as well as among the soldiers, but he certainly wasn’t better, since at the eve of a fight with the Prussians ordered to his troops not to start until he finished eating.

The officials were also divided in two levels, but noble. The one coming from the great aristocracy held the higher ranks, while the ones coming from the little country nobility, even though they often had superior abilities, were rarely able to reach the rank of Major. Yet, both were always proud opponents of the fact, absurd to them, that a non-noble could become an official even if he was capable to, and in fact Louis XVI – the king succeeded to the throne to the one in our Beast’s story and who had the same ideas in his head until he was decapitated – decided that only who was able to demonstrate to have at least four generations of pure noble race could become one of them. Not only, this was for everyone wearing a uniform, so for the dragons of the Volunteer of Clermont‘s militia too, who intervened in the case of the Beast. A thing already happening indeed. To say the truth there was a third level of officials, called fortune officials, not noble but capable and promoted thanks to particular courageous actions or because of long service, but they could only reach the rank of Lieutenant. What all these noble officials, who were said not to even remember at least three of their men’s names, used to do, we do not know, because during peace time were the Sergeants the one to actually and concretely take care of the troops’ administration and drill.

As it concerns the troop’s life, the food wasn’t enough and sometimes two or even three soldiers used the same camp bed on turn. And from the wage, already very modest, the days when they were obliged to work as manpower to build public works were reduced. This treatment meant few recruits and a very high degree of desertion; often, even more than one third of men, during the year, used to run away from the unit. To complete the lines during the periods of peace, they resorted to the volunteer enlistment, often by a trick or even through kidnapping. But the most part of the recruits, for these reasons, was formed by any kind of adventurer, criminals released from the prisons under the condition they’d enlist, escaping criminals or deserters from other armies. This was the French army’s situation also during the Beast of the Gévaudan’s period. Not all of them were like this, but this can make understand why several farmers of the area used to think it was better dealing with the Beast than with the soldiers. Besides, weren’t the dragons the one who several decades before, were guilty of a fierce repression around there?

To make you better understand, we have to go back in time and make an historical outline. Louis XIV (1638-1715), uncle of Louis XV, i.e. of the king involved against his will in the Beast’s story, was universally known as Sun King. At the age of only 5 he succeeded to the previous king, his father Louis XIII, but just in part because, due to his young age and other factors, who actually governed the reign of France was the cardinal Jules Raymond Mazarin, whose real name was Giulio Raimondo Mazarino, being born in Pescina, Abruzzo. Only when he died Louis XIV was able to totally take the power reins. Availing himself of capable cooperators, the King settled the state finances issue, encouraged commerce and manufactures and re-organized the administration of justice, and the state machine, subjecting the local authorities to some Superintendents’ control, who directly answered to the King, which was him. Besides, to impose his hegemony to Europe, he committed himself in battles which allowed him to expand his colonies’ borders, but which debilitated the reign , already weakened by the economical crisis and by the famines, bringing it to serious financial difficulties.

This King’s obsession, was tightly keeping the reins of the power, centralizing and controlling everything, establishing a complete absolutism and destroying every force, noble or ecclesiastical, which tried to oppose. To the King was clear how dangerous for the reign were the civil fights and the lacking of a strong central power capable to oppose to the aristocracy and to the Church of Rome’s inclination to interfere, through the French clergy, in the French internal affairs. Indeed he used to say I am the State and he was convinced about it. To accomplish such aims, Louis XIV avoided the ministers or other lobbies to gain an exceeding power and he took a personal interest in every branch of the reign administration.

He managed to impose on the land aristocracy, which from the beginning of the XVII century was trying to oppose the king’s and his ministers’ power and which swaggered in the provinces, where the central power was still weak. In order to undermine this aristocracy the King attracted several noblemen to Versailles and he accustomed them to live with lavish pensions and incomes in a frivolous and sumptuous atmosphere, transforming this way the ancient political nobility in court nobility, completely separated from the rural population of the provinces and by then reduced to play a marginal role in the life of the Country. To firmly hold the central power he instead instituted the so-called King’s Councils, with only consultative powers and daily chaired by the King himself. Some members of the Council were ministers of the Crown, passive executors of the king’s orders. Louis XIV also provided to re-organize and centralize the provincial administrations, so that these, under the administrative, financial, judicial and military profile, were constantly tied to the central government. But what has this to do with the Beast’s story? I’m getting there.

It was inevitable that Louis XIV’s absolutism clashed with the Church of Rome, with the Huguenots, the Jansenists – Cornelius Janus’s followers, who in the Catholic sphere represented a dissident group – and so on. Each one of these, wanted a little or much power and the King couldn’t stand this. But he didn’t begin a conflict with Huguenots and Jansenists as defender of the Catholic orthodoxy, which he actually didn’t care about, but because he tended to eliminate every source of political, moral and religious authority, the Church of Rome included, trying to hinder his absolutism. In short, there had to be only him. Who thinks Louis XIV to have cultivated the personality worship, just for himself, is wrong. Let’s say he just had great and total sympathy and esteem for himself. It is true he had himself called Sun King because he illuminated and controlled the entire nation, that scholars and artists were the favourite as long as they adapted to the requirements of the absolute monarchy, i.e to his ones, that the press and the printing houses were watched or that Paris and the other cities were settled by town planners and architects to make the street meet in big squares where stood out, guess what, Louis XIV’s and his great predecessor Henry IV’s statues.

The king illuminated but also ruled with the iron fist. The Huguenots, thanks to the edict of Nantes, were now given special guarantees and Louis XIV at the beginning committed himself to respect it, but, as it was later discovered, in a more and more restrictive way. To have the Huguenots’ rights properly warded, but only by words, he named two commissioners for the province, one on them was catholic while the other was protestant, the former being actually the one with decisional power, while the latter was chosen among the most unqualified and anxious to maintain at a personal level the favours to the King. In the very rare cases of protests, there was a judging super partes committee, made by only catholics though. This is the way the work of annihilation of the Huguenots began, with the abolition of their courts, before recognized, and with the mass conversion in the areas of the Cévennes, Béarn and Languedoc. To encourage such spontaneous conversion the dragons were sent, who were responsible of several episodes of violence, known as dragonnades, on the local protestant population. Louis XIV’s fatherly advice brought in the end light changes for the Huguenots, which included trifles like the banning of the protestant religion, the destruction of all the Huguenots churches, the choice within 15 days for the protestant ministers to convert themselves or to go to exile, the closing of their schools, the violent catholic baptism for the French people born under the protestant faith, the obligation to come back for the exiles Huguenots under the punishment of confiscation of their properties and the persecution by law of the former-catholics converted to Calvinism. Louis XIV made this because he aspired to eliminate the Protestantism from France, also to pride on it in front of the Roman papacy and to get political advantages. The religious persecution though, damaged France because it caused a massive outflow of the Huguenots, which were in large part bankers, entrepreneurs, skilful craftsmen, and skilled workers. So, the French economy suffered an incalculable damage, mostly to advantage of other Countries ready to offer generous hospitality to the refugees, who gave an extraordinary boost to the local economy and who, for example in Switzerland, laid the basis of the future and most powerful Swiss banking system, as well as of the watch industry, with names like Breguet, Huaud, Meyronne, Arlaud, Angely, Vivien.

Of course the repression wasn’t well taken by all the protestants and a warfare began, in the mountainous land of the Cévennes and of the Languedoc, where armed groups of them, the so-called Camisards, under Jean Cavalier (1681-1740) and Roland Laporte‘s (1675-1704) guidance, from 1702 led a ruthless resistance against the government forces, adopting a warfare technique based on quick night intrusions, on their perfect knowledge of the inaccessible area and having so over a barrel for more than two years the king’s troops, which were often fifteen times bigger. As it happened, for example, in December 1702, near to Alés, when Cavalier and 60 camisards defeated 700 soldiers. The rebellion, with blood and the diplomacy tending to divide the rebels, ended in January 1705, despite some isolated episodes of violence which kept happening until 1710. As it concerns our story of the Beast, all this makes us understand why the area was particularly important for the king of France, who was afraid of other uproars and revolts,why the authorities confiscated almost all the fire weapons for precautional reasons or anyway exerted strict restrictions and controls, why there were the dragons allocated in that place ready to take action and why the dragons were so hated. In short, the Beast’s action could trigger off a situation already very precarious and it could make a new rebellion break out, rebellion which, indeed broke out only twenty years later with the French Revolution.

The masses’ conditions of life were awful indeed, just think that in 1789, not much time after the years of our story, the average life was calculated in 21 years and 9 months for the lower classes of the population. For the nobles instead it was about 32 years, not many if compared to nowadays. These means were not given by the fact that people didn’t live longer, but by the high rate of child mortality, with only 2 children on 10 surviving the first year of life. Conditions, however, present at that time in other Countries, too. But for what concerns the other conditions, the French have-nots, which were the largest part of the population, lived worse than the others. Let’s see why.

The French fiscal system, now for almost a century, had become unequal, incapable and completely corrupt. The clergy didn’t pay the royal land tax, the feudal rights, duties and tolls, taxes on the goods, the so-called tax of the twentieth, wasn’t subjected to the corvées paid in nature, i.e compulsory but not paid working days, and its lands weren’t subjected to the hunt servants, which was the law allowing the noble to have with impunity hunting parties on the poor’s harvests. In short, the clergy didn’t pay anything. And the nobles? Poor they, were obliged, among the other aforesaid taxes, to pay only the royal land tax, an obvious thing, given that they were noble and landowners. The citizens instead, had to pay all of these taxes , but they weren’t obliged to the corvées. And the peasants? Poor things, they had to pay everything, of course. And they were also obliged to the corvées. But, pay attention, that’s not all. According to the needs of the State they had to pay the so-called Bac, which was a right of seigniory that made onerous the withdrawal of the river waters for an irrigation purpose; being they forbidden to equip with their own windmills, furnaces and presses as prescribed the so-called Banality, they were obliged to use the nobles’ ones, but at very high prices: they had to pay the tithes, a tenth of what had been produced, to the clergy for the maintenance of something like 40,000 curates, 10,00 high prelates, cardinals, bishops and teachers and other 140,000 hosted in about 10,000 convents or monasteries. Done? No, there were also the tithes or Grosses on the principal production of the farms, the special tithes or Novales on the new cultivation lands, the tithes on the cattle raising or Charnage, the tithes on the poultry raising or Mixtes, the tithes on the farming wage-earners’ daily remuneration and besides other tithes una tantum on occasional revenues justified by wars or something else.

The task of the taxes collection, was put out to contract to the Fermiers Généraux, which was a society of financiers who paid the government to get the concession. The general contractors got then back the investment, plus a remarkable profit, from the applied taxes and from the expropriation of what they were able to collect exceeding the minimum agreed with the Treasury. The collection rights in favour of nobility and clergy were then authorized by several ministers, or by members of the Royal family, who got in exchange sinecuras, pensions and other considerable gratuities. Basically, all the very rich men, or almost, were exempt from the taxes, weighing only on the middle and poor classes, like the salt tax, the wine tax, the wheat tax and so on. In short, the 50% of the population was poor, as well as illiterate, and it is not surprising, and a large part of it was dedicated to the concubinage. Why? Because of the fact that marriage, imposed as a sacrament by the Church, was actually prevented by the clergy who demanded exorbitant fares for its celebration, so that large part of the common people couldn’t get married and for this reason the Church itself accused it to be a mass of sinners. Some years after our story of the Gévaudan, precisely in 1770, finally a decree imposed to the clergy the free celebration of marriage in favour of the poorest, a thing though greatly opposed and which gave meagre results. The situation was solved only in 1791, with the Revolution. Everything was based on the intrigues and to the detriment of the poor.

Every public activity was a privilege purchased at a high price or inherited and the same happened for the most prestigious jobs, grouped in cliques. The civil, military and ecclesiastical offices were reserved to some privileged classes and, in this sphere, only to some individuals. Basically, who was born poor, had to stay poor and couldn’t raise to a higher class. The same was in the justice field, so that the magistrate office was often purchased, became part of the family fortune and was passed on the heirs. Not only, in several districts the administration of justice had to be paid, so the lawsuits were won by who had more money to pay the judge, who was legally corruptible, in practice. After this short description, you have understood that nothing worse could happen to the common people. Rather no, something was missing. The Beast came.

The attacks increase

Well. Let’s go back to that August 1764, with the Beast always lying in ambush. The circumstances of the fourth attack are unknown. The victim, at about the end of the same month, it was probably the 25th August, was a fifteen year old boy from Chalyard-l’Eveque, parish of Chaudeyrac. Here is the same consideration that the poor victim – whose body once recovered resulted to have been only partially devoured – couldn’t have satisfied a similar animal. In short, we suppose it would take advantage of the situation to fully feed itself, but it didn’t.

Was the Beast a wolf or a wild cross between a dog and a wolf, the food needs are similar. If a wolf about thirty kilos heavy ate everyday, a thing hard to happen, it would need about a kilo and a half of food per day. It is an average quantity, we’d say, for dogs of that dimensions, indeed the Australian dingo, about thirty kilos heavy too, has the same food need, and just a bit more needs the just a bit bigger african wild dog. The same food needs, in proportion to their dimension, have the smaller asian wild dogs, the cuons, and the coyotes in North America. A twice bigger wolf, between the fifty and the sixty kilos, would need about three kilos of food, daily. The dimensions of the Beast killed by Chastel in 1767, as we will see, were roughly similar. Seeing that regularly and daily finding what to eat is a difficult if not an impossible thing for a wild predator, when they have the chance these animals- in the case of wolves- can eat really much, until a fifth of their weight, which is about twelve kilos for a specimen sixty kilos heavy. Given that, as we said, the victim’s corpse was devoured only in a small part, we obviously have to think that the beast was not terribly hungry, and so that it was able to find something else to eat, not human beings. What? For sure – as I wrote above – during those four months the beast had fed itself with something else, with wild animals or pets, or – and I didn’t write this above – with human corpses exhumed in the cemeteries, even though we do not have detailed information about that. Even though horrifying as you want, plenty of these deeds were signalled in the whole Europe, Italy included. Just to cite one, in 1564 in Esino Lario, province of Lecco, the authorities signalled the wolves to have exhumed a woodcutter’s corpse, buried out of the cemetery because guilty of heresy, to have dragged it far from there and to have devoured it there.

The