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Between 1764 and 1767 a huge beast terrorized the population in an 80 kilometer square area
of southeastern France. It was described as being as big as a calf, with a huge maw
of razor-sharp teeth, and in a three year period it killed more than a hundred people. And if you
think that this is just a myth or a legend, it is not. There were dozens of witnesses,
the attacks were well-documented, whatever it was it was something real. And while
the attacks stopped in 1767, the Beast itself was never positively identified.
The Beast of Gevaudan is an enduring mystery of history, and it deserves to be remembered.
The first attack occurred in the summer of 1764, a young woman who was watching
a herd of cattle was charged by a huge Beast, the likes of which she had never seen before.
But the Bulls in the herd managed to fend it off with their horns and so she escaped with
mere scratches. But she describes something fantastic! A beast with a huge broad chest,
with a massive head and neck, its ears were on top of its head and they stuck straight up,
looking almost like horns. It's great hound like maw was full of massive fangs. Its tail, unlike
a wolf, was long and thin, it had huge claws and it moved extremely fast, and when it ran,
it could leap enormous distances in each leap! The Beast attacked dozens of more people in the coming
months. It seemed to favor women and children but it even attacked full-grown adult males. It
would often attack people that were alone in the field, watching flocks or herds, but it also came
into towns and took victims mere feet from their own doorsteps. It favored attacking the head,
and most of the victims that were found and had their throats torn out. Sometimes it would carry
the bodies away and virtually all of the bodies were at least partially eaten. In these horrific
scenes the beasts would sometimes leave behind just rent limbs and body parts! And there were
so many attacks that people became convinced that there must be more than one beast, because
some of the reports made it sound like there was more than one attack occurring at the same time!
Astoundingly in October of 1764, two hunters claimed to have come upon the Beast and shot it
with their muskets at close range, several times. Each time to be staggered but astoundingly got up
again and continued to move away, eventually escaping into the woods. And they were not the
only ones who claimed to have shot the Beast at close range only to have it get up and walk away.
In 1765, the story reached the attention of the King, Louis the 15th, who sent several known wolf
hunters as well as his own Master of the Hunt, to hunt down and put an end to the beast. They killed
a lot of wolves and at least one extraordinarily large wolf, but it turned out not to be the Beast,
the attacks resumed, at least a dozen more people died in 1765. The beasts continued to terrorize
the region clear until June of 1767, when a large hunt was organised by a local nobleman
and a local farmer named Jean Chastel, shot another huge wolf the attack stopped and so
it was assumed that that was the Beast of Gevaudan and Jean Chastel was a local hero.
It is a terrifying story but were all these attacks really just the result of
one extraordinarily large wolf? Well there are lots of theories about the Beast of Gevaudan,
but three are most credible. The one that is most commonly accepted is that these attacks were
simply the attacks of packs of wolves, and that public hysteria exaggerated the description of the
animals. Wolves were known to attack livestock in Europe and people as well. Wolves were responsible
for at least thousands of deaths in Europe in the 16th, 17th and 18th century. But the
patterns don't necessarily fit. Wolves generally attack weaker prey and very rarely attack, say,
full-grown humans, who could defend themselves. An analysis of the attacks that were attributed
to the Beasts of Gevaudan showed that that Beast attacked adults at a rate six times
that of other known European wolf attacks. And it would be extraordinarily strange, for just
wolves in one area to just change their behavior for just that one three year period of time.
A second theory is that the Beast might have been a hybrid of a wolf and a dog,
possibly a mastiff. And that the Beast might have been actually trained by someone to attack people.
Some descriptions make it sound like maybe the Beast was even outfitted with armor that was made
from boars hide, which would explain why it could be shot and still run away. Also if it was trained
and directed by a human, that would explain why its targets were different than you would
expect of normal wolf or dog attacks. And the suspicion falls on the hero farmer, Jean Castel,
who was known to own a very large red Mastiff. Now what his motive would have been is an interesting
question, but he did become quite the hero when he supposedly killed the Beast. Perhaps he was
just a serial murderer who was covering up his own crimes, or maybe he orchestrated the entire thing
in order to get assistance in eradicating wolves, who would have been a threat to his livestock.
A third theory was proposed recently by German naturalist Karl-Hans Taake. Taake theorizes that
the Beast of Gevaudan was in fact, a sub-adult male lion. That explains some things that the
wolf, or wolf dog explanations just don't explain, like how it could leap long distances as it ran,
or its use of claws in attacking, something that wolves and dogs normally do not do. And while a
peasant of the 18th century likely knew what a lion was, the pictures that they had seen,
the drawings would likely have been a full-grown adult male lion with full Mane's. And the sub
adult lion looks quite different and it might not necessarily have been recognized. The pattern
seems to fit, a sub-adult lion has a dark streak down its back, of course the long and thin tail
sounds more like a lion than a wolf's. Sub-adult Lions also sometimes have spots. And the attack
patterns and the victims that were chosen also are more fitting for a lion than they would be
for a wolf. But if the Beast of Gevaudan was a lion how did it get to France? Well Taakes
theory is that it escaped from a menagerie. See in the 18th century there was a lot of
interest in Natural Sciences and so it was quite popular for wealthy people to have collections of
exotic animals. The Beast of Gevaudan was likely brought to France as a lion cub that escaped.
And the terror of this particular explanation is, that that means that the Beast of Gevaudan,
who killed more than a hundred people, was the result of human carelessness.
The Beast of Gevaudan is an enduring mystery and as there is no known genetic material that can be
definitively tied to the Beast, we might never have a full answer. But maybe exactly what the
Beast was is the wrong question. Maybe the more important question is what the story of the Beast
of Gevaudan says about history at the time. The Beast of Gevaudan was the first real national
news story, and it was greatly amplified by a nation news media that reveled in gory depictions
of the attacks in crudely Illustrated printed broadsheets. And so it is more than the story of
an animal, it's the story of people's perceptions of the attacks skewed, by the politics of an
unsettled era, where the power structures and traditional modes of thought were in constant,
and sometimes violent transition. It came in the middle of the Age of Enlightenment,
and following the Scientific Revolution, and it represented the juxtaposition,
the conflict between superstition and science, and people that were gripped in the conflicting
ideas of a new scientific rationalism, but also an obsession with the occult. It represented
the complexity of the relationships between the nobility and the peasantry at a time when those
very relationships were under question, literally on the doorstep of the French Revolution. And it
came in a period when religion and religious understanding was in flux, and as organized
religion which had caused many of the Wars of the previous century was being rejected,
there was still a belief in morality where God punished evil, perhaps even by sending
a terrifying beast. And as the world was thrust into the modern era, it might not matter whether
the Beast of Gevaudan was a wolf or a dog or a lion, because the sum of the people's
fears at the time could have transformed any of those...into the terrifying Beast of Gevaudan.
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