Beast of Gevaudan

Attacks on women and children of Gevaudan in the 1760s sparked a huge effort to hunt and kill the mystery beast behind them. While efforts to track the animal struggled, France was gripped in terror. Read the show notes here.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Polly Fry. So recently
I asked for Halloween episode suggestions because I had this

(00:23):
whole list of Halloween episode suggestions and really none of
them were peaking my interest at all. That happens, Yeah,
it's I had sort of analysis paralysis about Halloween episodes. Um.
Then Helene suggested the Beast of Jeffadon, and the second
that I made sure that there was a legitimate academic
source in English that I had access to, I stopped

(00:45):
looking for any other Halloween topic because this one is
frightening and grizzly and just deeply fascinating. So, uh, that's
your heads up if you if you need for a
warning about frightening gresley things, this is frightening and grizzly.
For hundreds of years, wolf attacks in Europe were really

(01:06):
not all that rare. Today, the sort of ecologists motto
is that healthy wolves don't attack humans, but this was
absolutely untrue in early modern Europe. There were thousands of
attacks by rabid wolves, and thousands more attacks by apparently
healthy wolves. There had even been multiple incidents in this

(01:28):
period in which the same wolf or a group of
wolves killed multiple people over a period of weeks or months.
So wolves in general were considered to be a threat
and uh any kind of outdoor work, especially if it
was around animals like sheep or goats that might attract wolves,

(01:49):
was considered to be inherently dangerous. But the attacks that
struck the Javadan region in the seventeen sixties really stand
out in particular, almost exclusively, the victims were women and children,
mostly attacked while they were tending animals. Um. The men
were generally left alone, even when they were doing the

(02:12):
exact same work. The beast method of killing was also horrific.
In description after description, people talked about it dropping onto
a victim in broad daylight, ripping out its throat, often
decapitating the person entirely. So people were scared of wolves,
but they were terrified of this beast um, which is

(02:36):
why we're going to talk about it today, Happy Halloween.
Uh So, for some context, the Javidant region in the
south of France was remote and sparsely settled at this time,
so most of its people made their livings as farmers
and shepherds. The terrain was forested and mountainous, there were
lots of rocky outcroppings, and all of this put it

(03:00):
kind of made it an area that was sort of
perfect for, or perfectly dangerous for wolf attacks the beasts.
First recorded victim in the Javadon was a fourteen year
old named Jean Boulet, who was killed while watching over
livestock at the end of June seventeen sixty four, and

(03:21):
then on August eight, a fifteen year old girl was killed,
followed by a sixteen year old boy. A couple of
weeks later, in September, things took a deadlier turn, with
four attacks claiming the lives of a thirty six year
old woman and several more youths. Because the wolf attacks
were already so common, and because some of these, in

(03:42):
particular happened more than twenty miles apart from each other,
it was only after this particularly deadly period in September
that people realized something different was going on. During this time,
France was divided into administrative regions no a generality. By October,

(04:02):
the generality second in command, Etienne la Fran, started trying
to organize a constant series of patrols to protect people
and find this wolf. Working with a local landowner, he
tried to keep eight or ten people on watch at
all times, but he had a little bit of trouble recruiting.
People were already pretty scared to stray far from their

(04:25):
homes and into their own fields. Uh So getting them
to go patrol other people's fields was not exactly the
easiest cell. Lafon wound up securing funds to actually pay people,
and he started talking to the higher ups in the
generality about the possibility of bringing in professional soldiers. Dragoon
captains Jean Baptiste Duamel was stationed nearby and was also

(04:49):
active in the hunt. He and his men started scouring
areas near where the attacks had happened, hoping to find
the culprit. It was around October that and people minds,
at least the culprit shifted from being an animal to
being some sort of monster. People's letters and even news
reports went from describing a bete fero's a general sort

(05:12):
of generic description of a ferocious beast, to talking about
the bets with a capital B or laments, so the monster.
People in more urban and affluent parts of France didn't
really believe in werewolves anymore, but that idea was still
pretty entrenched in the more rural parts of the country.
The beasts decapitated a twenty year old woman on October seven,

(05:35):
and it took a week for people to find her skull.
Between October seven and fifteen, six teenagers and a ten
year old boy were attacked, with most of them sustaining
huge injuries to their heads and faces. Only four of
these victims survived. Newspapers started describing the beast as being
deliberately bloodthirsty, apparently drinking the victim's blood from their x

(06:00):
before moving on to the flesh. Ettienna Font advised the
women and children tending the flocks that they'd be escorted
at all times by armed men, and this unfortunately opened
the door to some victim blaming. The economy in this
part of France was still really feutile. Men and women
and children all had work to do, and all of

(06:20):
the work was necessary for their survival, so men really
did not have the option of dropping what they were
doing to escort women and uh women and children didn't
have the option to just stay out of the fields
until they had a man with them. They also didn't
have the option of just swapping jobs, since all of
these jobs involved being outdoors for the most part, and

(06:44):
people didn't just sit around cowering. Though It's important to
note the hunting parties and patrols that had been established
cleared brush, and they gave chase whenever they saw an
animal that they thought might be the culprit. They killed
more than one wolf in all of this, but the
attacks went on. By the end of October, pretty much
everybody in the Javanant region agreed that they were not

(07:07):
dealing with a normal wolf. I witness accounts really very
dramatically in what the beasts looked like. Some of them
described it as having talents, Several described it as having
this dark stripe that ran down its back um. The
one unifying part of all the descriptions was that it
was much bigger than a normal wolf. People theorized that

(07:28):
it could be a range of animal suspects, including a
wolf of course, uh hyena was also mentioned, some kind
of wolf, dog, hyena hybrid, even a monkey was brought
up as a possibility. And this last seems to have
started by a report in a newspaper called Curier, which
quoted an American woman who said her country was full

(07:49):
of fearsome monkeys that did exactly this kind of thing,
which makes me go, really, I'm like qua, really, American lady. So,
the explanation for how a hyena or a monkey could
have gotten into the south of France was that they
had stowed away aboard a ship or maybe escaped from

(08:09):
a menagerie. Um. This theory was actually a source of
hope to people who thought that if this was some
kind of tropical animal, that it would just die when
the winter came. It was probably also somewhat soothing to
consider that it could be something escaped from a menagerie
rather than an actual, uh sort of unnatural monster, that

(08:32):
that would be more of an unknown, slightly less brightening uh. So,
late in October, a small group of hunters on the
search for the beast flushed a large wolf from its den,
and they shot it repeatedly. And this large wolf was
slowed by the bullets, but it could still move more
quickly than the men that were chasing it, and so
it got away and they never found the body uh

(08:55):
and came to the conclusion that it had somehow survived
their gunfire. This attributed to the idea that there was
something supernatural at work. It really shouldn't be surprising that
as these attacks went on, since they were just spectacularly
gory and horrifying, newspapers became increasingly sensational in their coverage

(09:15):
of it. Here's an account of an event in November.
Quote on the twenty three, at five o'clock in the evening,
this cruel beast throttled a woman in a village, and
after having eaten the neck all the way down to
the shoulders and having sucked the blood from the body,
it carried away. The head hunters, Uh, in sort of

(09:37):
a grizzly move, began using the remains of the beasts
victims as bait. They were hoping to draw the creature
out again. Uh. Not only did it not work, it
also upset people understandably, and as the fall turned to winter,
the weather started to seriously get in the way of
effectively hunting. Before we talk about the next major shift

(10:00):
and all of this, Holly, would you like to take
a moment for a beef word from a sponsor? And would? Indeed,
in December, the dragoons led by Jehan Baptist duam L
found what they thought was the beast while they were
hunting through the forest. Du am L himself was prepared
to fire on it. He had it in his sights,
but the other men, not realizing what was going on,

(10:21):
came up behind him and startled it. They unfortunately lost
sight of the beast as the sun went down. Doom
L was deeply distressed by this, not merely because he
had missed their corey at the likely expense of more
lives being lost, but he also had a little bit
of an ego element in the in the mix. He

(10:42):
didn't want to lose the glory of being the one
that took the beast down. Yeah, he was a soldier
and had you know, gotten a claim on the field
of battle before, and now that he was not in
a battle, he was very frustrated by the failure to
get more acclaim. And fortunately this is just the first
of many of doom L's failures to capture his quarry.

(11:04):
As people started to question whether he knew what he
was doing, he started distributing drawings and telling people really
vivid accounts of this monster to try to convince everyone
that it wasn't his fault. He was sort of building
this mythology that the creature was too powerful and too
obviously supernatural to be caught quickly, And as seventeen sixty

(11:25):
four drew to a close, a bishop from the church
put out an official circular that said that the beast
was a scourge sent by God. So it just built
that mythology up a little bit more. In January of
seventeen sixty five, doom L started sending out his dragoons
dressed as women to try to escort women and children
about their duties in the fields. He was hoping that

(11:48):
the wolf would mistake them for a woman in attack,
since they mostly attacked women and children. Uh, this didn't work.
I like that the beast could clock their drag um.
On January twelve, a twelve year old boy known as
porta Fe reportedly chased down the wolf and attacked it
with a bayonet after it had attacked and dragged off

(12:10):
a small child. Uh. Porta Fe became famous for this
act of extreme bravery or foolishness, depending on your point
of view, Although there were accounts of it that were
heavily embellished, and the different accounts of what actually happened
very quite a bit from one to another porta Fay, however,
became a rallying cry. Duomel, becoming kind of desperate to

(12:34):
uh to catch the thing and to maintain his his reputation,
organized a massive hunt to take place on February seventh,
seventeen sixty five. This was not the first coordinated hunt
that was going to take place for multiple parts of
this area in France at the same time, but it
was definitely the biggest. About twenty thousand people gathered in

(12:56):
about one hundred different parishes, and in spite of there
being heavy fog that day and about six inches of
snow on the ground, search parties spread out from their
respective communities at the same time to try to find
the beast. One party thought they did, and as they
pursued the animal that they believed to be the beast,
it tried to escape down a river. Villagers in the

(13:19):
town of Malzieu were supposed to be patrolling the river banks,
but one of that town's most prominent citizens had said
he would stay home if the weather was bad, and
enough people followed his example that the beast easily slipped
through this hole in the defenses, however, and perhaps in
an effort to save face, a hunting party from Malsu

(13:40):
claimed that it had seen and shot the beast, so
Duomel abandoned his original plan, which was to have a
second massive hunt on the eleventh if the one on
the seventh failed. Instead, he arranged a smaller hunt to
focus just on the area around Malie, to take place
on the tenth. As they were hunting, a teenage girl

(14:02):
was killed while feeding her livestock. Du am L regrouped
and prepared to keep hunting near where that attack had
occurred on the eleventh, using the girl's body as bait.
They did not succeed on the eleventh, and they tried
again on the twelfth, this time fighting biting, windy weather,
and in spite of their multi day attempt and with

(14:23):
so many hunters on the on the team, they found nothing.
On his return from this hunt, duom L again tried
to explain his failure and retain his position with a
supernatural explanation. According to him, the beast was a witch
or the devil. After all, twenty thousand men, which he

(14:44):
in his telling rounded up to thirty thousand, had failed
to get it, so it had to be magical or supernatural. Okay,
he was really getting desperate to hold onto his position.
What he did not know was that his replacement, says
by sickly wolf Hunter in Chief, had already been chosen
and were on their way to the Jevadon. Jean Charles

(15:07):
marc Antoine de Vonzelle Doneval of Normandy took Jean Baptiste
Dummel's place in the fight against the Beast of Jebudon.
They arrived in February, with Jean Charles's son, Jean Francois
accompanying his father. The DNA Val did not get along
with the wolf hunters and the Jevadant. They made demands
for help and for accommodations that rankled people. They were

(15:31):
simultaneously overconfident and underprepared. Some of the other wolf hunters,
who had been searching the Jevadon for months, decided that
they were frauds. You know how in bad, badly written
crime dramas, you have the scene where the local police
have been trying really hard to catch the killer and
then some really slick FBI guys come in and stop
all over their investigation. It was like that, Yeah, they

(15:54):
were all swagger and did not really have the skills. Meanwhile,
In March, the London Chronicle published an obviously satirical article,
possibly written by Horace Walpole, about the beast, saying that
it had eaten the entire French army and was found
to have mortars, cannons and at least one hundred small
arms in its belly when it was slain. This really

(16:17):
annoyed the people of France in the monarchy because a
lot of people had been killed in the Gevaudan already,
so to kind of make fun of the whole thing
was kind of a slap in the face. We should
put these years into the was England at war with
France websites? Yeah, I don't think that they were, but
they were socially they were having some issues. Um, even

(16:42):
in light of the fact that France was facing facing
international criticism for its failure to take care of this
wolf problem, and King Louis himself was eager to have
this beast killed, the Dentivals did not do much in
March or April. They just did not seem to be
in a big hurry. They blamed local people for all

(17:03):
manner of ills and for their failure to get the beast. Meanwhile,
there were fourteen deaths over those two months. One death
in particular of note. On March thirteenth, the beast attacked
a group of children in the garden outside their home,
and their mother, Jeanne Varley, was with them and reported

(17:24):
to be pregnant. She turned to see the beast attack
her six year old, and in a struggle that went
on for several minutes of Varlet climbed onto the beast's
back in an effort to wrestle her child from its jaws.
When she fell off, it jumped over a hedge, and
she gave chase. One of her older children was inside
the house and he heard the commotion and came out

(17:45):
with a lance and the family sheep dog, and he
chased the animal and they basically fought it until it
tired out, abandoned its quarry, and ran away. The six
year old, unfortunately didn't survive, although the rest of the
family did, and Varley's story spread as one of heroic tragedies.
So she became kind of an emblem of the need

(18:07):
to get this over with. Yeah, I'm sure that was
a little bit of an ego blow to all of
these hunters that a pregnant woman and her children had
kind of had better luck at least kind of running
this animal down than they had with their firepower and
hunting knowledge. Uh. In early May, the Denival started trying
to combat the wolves by poisoning the bodies of their

(18:30):
victims and leaving them out as bait. This did not
work and once again upset people. Then in mid May,
there was a two week period with no wolf attacks.
The Denevals took credit for it, and they said they
must have actually killed a wolf that they'd shot and
had then gotten away earlier in the month. Then, when

(18:50):
another attack happened on May nineteenth, they started trying to
seek the protection of the king at Versailles. They were
afraid that their actions were going to catch up up
with them and that they themselves might come to harm.
They were finally forced to leave town and their reputations
were in shreats. And before we turn to a little

(19:11):
happier part of this story, let's take another brief movement
for a word from a sponsor that sounds grand, and
now we will get onto the resolution of what happened
in Jeviden with this beast. So the Dnevals who have
been run out of town were soon replaced by Francois Antoine,
who was the king's gun bearer. He organized hunts with

(19:33):
dogs and men, using dogs in particular to try to
cover the regions more difficult to rain, and unlike the dnevals,
he was extremely polite. He gained the trust and the
affection of the locals. He did not walk in with
a bunch of attitude and swagger. He really tried to
work with them, and he worked through the summer of
seventeen sixty five as the deaths continued to find the beast.

(19:54):
On September, Antoine caught sight of a wolf so big
that at worst he thought it was a donkey. From
about fifty paces away. He shot it with a long
barreled musket that he loaded with a lead ball, along
with lots of other smaller pieces of shot. The animal
was hit, but it wasn't killed. It got to its
feet and went after Antoine, who had to retreat. Rather

(20:16):
than trying to reload his weapon. Monsieur Riehard, who was
an officer of the hunt, delivered the actual killing shot.
They took the wolf's body to a nearby chateau, and
then they brought in people who had either witnessed or
survived attacks to identify it, they all agreed that this
was the wolf that attacked them, and even so Antoine

(20:39):
urged people not to drop their guard. Yet pretty much
everyone in the Javadan who looked at it agreed that
the thing was enormous, and as Antoine and others told
the story over and over at depositions and when talking
to the newspapers, this description just got bigger and bigger.
Antoine said about hunting for any off bring the beast

(21:00):
may have had, and ordering an artisan to construct a
frame for its skin so that it could be preserved
and sent to the king. It wound up being embalmed instead,
and by the time that happened, it had already started
to decompose. The beast body arrived at Versailles on the
first of October, but the court of Versailles was not
nearly as impressed with it as the people of the

(21:23):
Javadan had been. They had really suffered from some inflated
expectations by people increasingly talking about how more and more
monstrous this thing was. Also because of what we just
discussed with the embalming it smelled, Antoine finished his task
of seeking and destroying wolves from around the area where
the beast had been killed on October seventeenth, and for

(21:44):
more than two months there were no more wolf attacks.
This is actually a you know, it stretched into like
that was two months from when he finished killing, but
it wound up that there weren't any deaths from when
he shot that wolf until December seventh, seventeen sixty five.
That day, two boys survived a wolf attack while they
were guarding cattle, and then an eleven year old girl

(22:06):
was killed on December twenty one. Unlike the first time around,
when it had taken so many deaths before people saw
it as a pattern. Everyone immediately panicked. However, there was
also this uh kind of issue of saturation everyone also,
while they were quicker to recognize this danger, they were

(22:27):
also kind of tired of talking about this beast. Uh.
So there are far fewer newspaper reports and other records
detailing what happened between Francois Antoine killing a wolf on
September set and Jean Shastel killing another one in August
of seventeen sixty seven. Yeah, so almost two years later.

(22:49):
The wolf that Shastel killed was big, although not nearly
as big as the one that Antoine had killed almost
two years before. However, Schastell followed what Antoine had done.
He like followed his example. He rounded people up to
I d this wolf and say that it was the
wolf that had attacked them, and then he sent its
body to Versailles. However, by the time it arrived in

(23:10):
Versailles it was extremely rotten. The king was extremely insulting
to Chastel and his son for having just brought this
rotten wolf carcass into his presence, and the king ordered
them all away. Folklorist and researchers started documenting the Jebudin
wolf loor almost immediately. Uh In the eighteen eighties, a
man named Pierre Pouchet wrote an enormous history of the wolf,

(23:34):
and there are all kinds of theories about exactly what
this animal was, and whether it was acting on its
own or whether it had been trained to somehow attack people.
This last theory actually got a shot in the arm
when people realized that Jean Shastell had played a prank
on a wolf hunting party two years before. They had

(23:55):
basically said, hey, is this ground up here safe to
walk on? And he was like, yeah, it's awesome, and
was actually a bog and so the wolf hunters sunk
into it up to their chests while he laughed along
a sideline. Uh. There are people who were extremely suspicious
of him now and kind of wonder if he had
trained animals to attack other people, and that that gap

(24:18):
between killing one wolf and UH and another attack happening
was because he was having to retrain another animal that
gets a nest some kind of conspiracy theory ideas not
totally sure. We should call Ben and Madden and see
what they think. We will probably never know for sure
if this beast was actually a wolf, or multiple wolves,

(24:41):
or perhaps even something else that hasn't been identified. More recently,
the beast makes an appearance in the movie Brotherhood of
the Wolf. I love that movie so much. I can't
even describe. That goes into the category of cinema that
I like to call out fromage because it's a little cheesy,
but it's also really fanta plastic fun and which is

(25:02):
the important part for me. Uh. And the Jevadan region
is now part of the Department of Logier. That happened
after the French Revolution though, so that was not in
play when this was going on, right, So that is
the beast of Jevadon creepy and yeah, the book that
was the primary source on this. Normally when I researched episodes,

(25:26):
they're like fifteen or twenties sources at least. Um. This
one was mostly sourced from a book by J Smith
called Monsters of the Jevadon, which was published by Harvard
University Press in two thousand and eleven. That's pretty much
the source in English on this story, so it has
a lot more detail about various things that went on

(25:48):
if you were interested in it. I had to get
it from inter Library loan Um, which is I had
to time it just right. So if this story interests you,
I highly recommend that book. It sent to UM sort
of the beginning of it talks a lot about how
the the search for what was this animal kind of

(26:09):
distracts from the greater story of like why people in
France were so obsessed with this thing when it was
going on. So it's a good read. I also have
a listener mail I'm gonna I'm gonna read two things
about spam, spam, spam spam. The first thing about spam
is from Lisa. Lisa says, Hi, Tracy and Holly, I

(26:30):
don't actually eat spam. I'm vegetarian, but I did like
your episode this week. I was surprised that spam actually
doesn't include junk meats like hot dogs do, but it
still looks a little gross to me. I've never actually
tried it, though, so I'll take your word that tastes
better than it looks. I live in South Korea, and
seeing people in stores and dressed up in hand buck
which is traditional dress during the big holidays, selling large

(26:51):
gift sets of spam was one of those things that
that was really strange when I moved here. It's one
of those giftbox types that a lot of expats kind
of joke about what your school get you for stuck
any spam, No, just a box of tooth baste and
so soap. But now that I'm used to seeing it,
it's not strange anymore. I've heard from a lot of
people about how spam became popular here during the Korean War.

(27:12):
As you guys mentioned in your podcast, actually during holidays
they are still very common gifts, along with expensive boxes
of enormous fruit, boxes of hanwo beef, which is really
the meat considered to be the luxury here now, and
everyday things like shampoo um and then she says that
we did okay with our pronunciations of Korean cuisines, which

(27:33):
made me really happy. Or she's very kind. Yes. The
other story that I wanted to read about spam is
from Samantha. Samantha says, I wanted to share with you
a little bit of spam history that you may or
may not have come across while doing your research. A
bit of backstory. I grew up a military brat and
moved all over the world with my Navy parents. For

(27:55):
two years, my family lived on the small Pacific island
of Guam. The island is devastating and beautiful, and the
shamorrow people love to throw parties, and the food of
these parties is amazingly flavorful and delicious. I know you
mentioned in the podcast that spam is popular in Guam,
but I don't think you understand just how popular. On
average Shamorrows. The native people of Guam sixteen tens of

(28:17):
spam per year, the highest per capita consumption in the world.
The island loves the can meet so much that the
McDonald's on the island have spam on the menu, and
my middle school spam fried rice was sold in the
cafeteria for breakfast and lunch, and even between classes you
could grab a quick snack on the go. I rarely
went to a classmates house without being offered some sort

(28:38):
of spam based meal. And although it was nearly twenty
years ago, I vividly remember begging my mother to purchase
one of those locally written and published spam cookbooks so
we could learn to cook like my classmates parents. A
few years ago, the Hormail company actually created a limited
edition spam can with flag of Guam to honor the
anniversary of the island's liberation from the Japanese occupation during

(28:59):
World War Two. I may be wrong, but I believe
they've done this a few times for similar reasons. Tabasco
is also very popular on Guam. They consume the highest
amount per capita of the spicy sauce as well. Guam
was the inspiration and testing ground for the hot and
Spicy Spam spam made with Tabasco. In case you're wondering, yes,
it is delicious. Thanks for making me crave spam like crazy.

(29:24):
We've gotten so many great spam stories. I have like
ten more of them flagged in the email for following up.
I doubt we will get to read many more spam stories.
I mostly wanted to read a couple more that were
from a couple of other places. I did eat some
spam after that episode. Yeah, while I was on my vacation.
It's a long story about the vacation, but we had

(29:45):
a theme of the vacation that was basically about Kaiju,
some big monster movies, and we made a lot of
foods that were from Asian cuisines um. And I had
told the person arranging the food that if she got
me some spam, I would like to try making some
spam musubi. And she did, and I wound up making

(30:05):
it little pieces of it instead of the big pieces
that they normally are. Because we had thirty five people, uh,
and I wanted more people than just me to get
to try it. We had a good time. It's quite yummy.
You sent me a picture and it looked very very cute. Yes,
like you did a good job with presentation. Yeah, we
put it on our on our Facebook wealth. I put

(30:26):
it a picture of it on there. So Uh, if
you would like to write to us about spam or
werewolves or anything else, you can do that at History
podcast the House toff Works dot com. We're also on
Facebook at Facebook dot com slash mist in History and
on Twitter at miss in History. Are Tumbler is missed
in History dot tumbler dot com, and we are on
Pinterest at pentriest dot com slash miss in History. Our

(30:47):
spreadshirt store, where you can buy all kinds of shirts
and things, is at mt in history dot spreadshirt dot com.
And if you would like to learn a little more
about what we have talked about today, comes to our
parent company's website. It is how stuff works dot com.
Put the word werewolf in the search bar. You will
find how Werewolves Work, which I actually wrote during my
days as a staff writer, which actually talks about the

(31:10):
Beast of Javadan, is one of the sources of werewolf
lore in modern culture. You can also come to our website,
which is missed in History dot com, to find show
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