The Beast of Gévaudan

Summary

From 1764 to 1767 an animal, or several, killed about 100 people in the Gévaudan in southern France, and the press made the killings a national sensation. Two animals taken for wolves were shot as the Beast, the second in June 1767, after which the attacks stopped.

Louis XV sent dragoons; professional wolf hunters followed; then the king sent his own gun-bearer, whose large wolf was stuffed and shown at court in 1765. The killings resumed within months. A local hunter shot the last animal in 1767, and the notary who examined it recorded a wolf, "mais extraordinaire". Whether there was one animal or many, and whether all of them were wolves, is still argued.

What is documented

The first deaths. The first named victim, Jeanne Boulet, was 14 and tending sheep when she was killed on 30 June 1764. The historian Jay M. Smith records an earlier attack, about two months before, on a young woman tending cattle, by a creature "like a wolf, yet not a wolf".

The toll. By June 1767 there had been close to 100 deaths and about twice as many attacks, according to the folklorist Meret Fehlmann's 2018 review of the case. Other modern accounts also give around 100 dead. Totals differ with the sources used and with which deaths are attributed to the animal.

The royal hunts. In autumn 1764 Louis XV stationed 57 dragoons in the region under Captain Duhamel. Duhamel described an animal with a breast "as wide as a horse" and concluded it was a hybrid whose father was a lion. In 1765 two professional wolf hunters from Normandy, the d'Ennevals, father and son, took over and failed. A group of children who drove the animal off were rewarded by the king, who paid for one boy's education.

Antoine's wolf. In June 1765 the king sent François Antoine, his gun-bearer. In September Antoine shot a large wolf. The carcass was sent to Versailles, stuffed and displayed, and Antoine returned to court and collected the reward. The attacks resumed in late autumn 1765.

Chastel's animal. On 19 June 1767 Jean Chastel, a hunter from La Besseyre, shot an animal, which fell dead at the edge of the forest of La Ténazeyre, in the parish of Nozeyrolles near Mont Mouchet. The next day the royal notary Roch-Étienne Marin examined it with a physician and two surgeons at the château of Besques, where the Marquis d'Apchier had it shown to them. His report records that it appeared to be a wolf, "mais extraordinaire", and very different in its shape and proportions from the wolves of the country. It measured three French feet, about 97 centimetres, from the root of the tail to the top of the head. The report describes six incisors and two canines in each jaw, then six cheek teeth in each row above and seven in each row below. That is 20 teeth in the upper jaw and 22 in the lower, the lower figure as the report itself gives it, and 42 in all: the number a wolf has. The attacks stopped.

The press. François Morénas, editor of the Courrier d'Avignon, reported the attacks as faits divers, stories of village incidents, and his reporting turned a regional calamity into a national affair. The national and then the international press followed. Smith's 2011 study, Monsters of the Gévaudan, places the episode in the French life of the 1760s and asks why contemporaries assumed the animal was anything but a wolf, or a pack of wolves, "as authorities eventually claimed".

Leading explanations

Wolves, probably several (the leading explanation, not established for every attack). Smith, quoted by Smithsonian in 2017: "The best and most likely explanation is Gévaudan had a serious wolf infestation." Both animals killed as the Beast were taken for wolves by the men who examined them, and the Marin report's tooth count is a canid's. Brian Dunning of Skeptoid reached the same conclusion in 2020: "one or more large wolves", compounded by a widely held belief that it was much larger and fiercer than any ordinary wolf. What cannot now be established is how many animals there were, or which killed whom.

A wolf-dog hybrid or an unusual wolf (proposed, untested). It rests mainly on the notary's "extraordinaire" and on witnesses' descriptions of an animal unlike local wolves. Nothing that survives in the record can confirm or exclude it.

A lion or a hyena (proposed, contested). Both were suggested at the time: Duhamel had his lion hybrid, and an official named Lafont wrote of a snout "somewhat like a calf's" and very long hair, "which would seem to indicate a hyena". The biologist Karl-Hans Taake has argued for an immature male lion escaped from captivity, pointing to an ambush hunter that seized its victims by the neck and to descriptions that fit a young male's partial mane. Against both: the one detailed examination of a killed animal describes a canid, and Dunning notes that a striped hyena's markings would not have gone unmentioned in the written reports.

Human agency (untested speculation). Later writers proposed that someone trained or directed an animal, and the Chastel family has been named. No document supporting this has been produced in the accounts the registry consulted.

Current status

Partially explained. The killings happened, about 100 deaths over three years, and the record points to wolves: every animal killed as the Beast was taken for a wolf by the men who examined it, and the fullest surviving description, the Marin report, describes a canid with a wolf's teeth. What is not settled is how many animals were responsible, whether any was a hybrid or an unusual wolf, and whether the lion and hyena proposals can be excluded for all of them. These questions now turn on documents, and new archival work could narrow them.

Last reviewed: September 2026. Records are provisional. Where the evidence changes, the entry changes. Found an error? Tell us.