Beast of Gévaudan: a real monster, but was it a cryptid?

A French history expert explains.

February 20, 2024

Ahoy Comics new Project: Cryptid series has been digging deep for some obscure monsters, and we’re here for it. Issue #4 features France’s Beast of Gévaudan, so AIPT Science asked the man who literally wrote the book on the subject, French history scholar Jay M. Smith, to tell us more about it.

The rampage of the “Beast of Gévaudan,” as depicted by Henry Barajas and Salomée Luce-Antoinette in AHOY Comics’ Project: Cryptid #4, really happened, and the stories that circulated after the creature’s first attacks in the summer of 1764 readily lend themselves to sensationalistic recreations of the events. Bloody carcasses often accompanied by decapitated heads, vulnerable and unarmed peasants, a mysterious animal that contemporaries quickly identified as a “monster” — all of these features of the comic book tale also appear in the documentary record of the 1760s.

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“Monstre Qui Desole Le Gévaudan” is perfectly consistent in tone with most modern retellings of the Beast of Gévaudan legend. Based especially on the allegedly enigmatic character of the creature, and drawing liberally from 18th century descriptions of its form, shape, and habits, most 20th and 21st century accounts of the Beast of Gévaudan’s ravages emphasize dark intrigue. The supposedly unprecedented nature of the killings, the seemingly curious behavior of the principal hunters involved in the story, and the strange physical characteristics ascribed to the monster by some eyewitnesses (or those who claimed to be eyewitnesses) have been recurring features.

The legend of the Beast of Gévaudan has been this way since the half-forgotten story was resuscitated in a thick and influential tome published by a local priest named Pierre Pourcher, in the 1880s. The glowing eyes, the black stripe, and the beast’s ability to walk on its hind legs — all of which the author accepted as real and attributed to God’s vengeful presence in an irreligious age — continue to appear in modern accounts with remarkable consistency.

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Monsters of the Gévaudan: The Making of a Beast (2011), my book about the Beast of Gévaudan’s ravages and the commotion it inspired, offers a comparatively prosaic, but still gripping, account of this fascinating event. The chief huntsmen are shown to be flawed but well-meaning, and consumed by a sense of duty. The rumors about the beast’s physical characteristics and its seemingly magical properties (e. g. its hide could deflect lead musket shells launched from 10 paces!) had roots in local folklore about witches and enchanted creatures.

The rumors also reflected widespread credulity — from Paris and Berlin, all the way to the hills of the Gévaduan itself — in the face of unusual stories emanating from a rugged, remote, and putatively “uncivilized” region. Perhaps most important, the book establishes beyond reasonable doubt that the culprit responsible for the deaths of so many helpless peasant women and children between 1764 and 1767 was a wolf, or wolves.

Archivally-documented wolf attacks and human fatalities-by-wolf numbered in the thousands in early modern France. By mid-1765, even most local administrators in the Gévaudan had come to the quiet realization that the beast was “most likely” (Lafont’s words) a wolf. In light of this, hypotheses about magical, exotic, or pre-historic creatures roaming through the Gévaudan become unnecessary. The Gévaudan, like many other regions in France between the 1690s and the 1760s, was afflicted by a dense wolf infestation that finally receded only at the end of the 18th century.

Like those other regions (the Soissonais, the Limousin, the Lyonnais), which also saw scores of fatalities, the Gévaudan experienced disorienting loss of life and confronted far too many grisly human remains. But there’s no reason to assume that an African hyena, or a leopard, or a lion, or a hybrid creature, never mind a witch or some willfully malevolent actor, lay behind this gruesome episode.

The question, then, is why? Why were so many people at the time convinced that the Gévaudan had been invaded by an outlandish creature whose behavior lay “outside the rules of nature” (as dictionaries defined the monster in the 18th century)? I point to several highly specific historical circumstances to account for the runaway imaginations. (Judging by newspaper accounts from the day, the fascination for the Beast of Gévaudan ranged from Prussia to Massachusetts, from Turin to London and Amsterdam, and many points in between.)

First, an enterprising newspaper publisher capitalized on the story of the Beast of Gévaudan to boost sales, and to become the “paper of record” on this particular story. François Morénas of the Courrier d’Avignon (duly noted in Project: Cryptid #4) recognized immediately that the wild stories surrounding the killings in the nearby Gévaudan could take the place of popular stories generated by the recently completed Seven Years’ War (peace treaty signed in 1763). He flogged the story, making it the leading “headline” time and time again, for more than a year.

Several French veterans of the Seven Years’ War, having experienced humiliating defeats and carrying with them a wounded sense of honor, also contributed to the frenzy surrounding the Beast of Gévaudan. Assigned the task of eliminating the predator, they exaggerated the nature of the animal they pursued and used their correspondents and their contacts at contemporary newspapers, especially the Courrier, to hype the fantastical nature of the beast. This strategy conveniently excused repeated failures to find and conquer the enemy in their midst, but it also raised expectations that became ever harder to satisfy.

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The scientific literature of the age also fed curiosity about hybrid creatures and unclassifiable “monsters,” a subject of learned inquiry since the early years of the 18th century. The electric currency of the term “monster” explains why even well-educated elites paid close attention to the stories about the strange and lethal creature doing damage in the south.

There are some minor errors in the details of “Monstre Qui Desole Le Gévaudan.” There were only about 100 victims of the Beast of Gévaudan (not 200), the modern region of the Gévaudan is called the Lozère (not the Loire), King Louis XV never risked his life during the search for the beast, and Etienne Lafont was a sympathetic crisis manager, not a heartless aristocrat following a good story.

Still, Project: Cryptid #4 clearly shows that the colorful details from this strange case continue to prove irresistible. Monsters of the Gévaudan: The Making of a Beast is meant to further explain why a horrific but mundane confrontation between human settlement, on the one hand, and naturally predatory animals, on the other, became an obsession that survives to this day.

Every February, to help celebrate Darwin Day, the Science section of AIPT cranks up the critical thinking for SKEPTICISM MONTH! Skepticism is an approach to evaluating claims that emphasizes evidence and applies the tools of science. All month we’ll be highlighting skepticism in pop culture, and skepticism *OF*pop culture.

AIPT Science is co-presented by AIPT and the New York City Skeptics.