October 5, 2019 • 28 mins
This 2014 episode covers attacks on women and children of Gevaudan in the 1760s, which sparked a huge push to hunt and kill the mystery beast behind them. While efforts to track the animal struggled, France was gripped in terror.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
Happy Saturday, everybody. It is our favorite month of the
show and the best month of the year in my opinion.
And to kick it off, we are going back to
a previous October episode, The Beast of Gevadon, which came
out on October. So in the course of this episode,
we make a passing reference to a website about whether
England was at war with France. And if you get
(00:24):
to that point and you're like, what are they talking about?
Several years ago we basically joked about how England and
France were at war with each other so frequently that
there should just be one of those websites where you
could put in a year and it would tell you
yes or no, were they at war. After we made
that joke, two different listeners made one of these websites.
One of those websites is still active. We will put
(00:44):
a link in the show notes, so enjoy. Welcome to
Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of I
Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Polly Frying. So recently
(01:07):
I asked for Halloween episode suggestions because I had this
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
(01:29):
that I made sure that there was a legitimate academic
source in English that I had access to, I stopped
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, grizzly things, this is frightening and grizzly.
(01:51):
For hundreds of years, wolf attacks in Europe were really
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
(02:12):
healthy wolves. There had even been multiple incidents in this
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
(02:33):
was around animals like sheep or goats that might attract
wolves was considered to be inherently dangerous, but the attacks
that struck the Jevadan 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.
(02:56):
The men were generally left alone and when they were
doing the exact same work. The beasts 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
(03:19):
scared of wolves, but they were terrified of this beast um,
which is 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,
(03:44):
There were lots of rocky outcroppings, and all of this
put it UH kind of made it UH an area
that was sort of perfect for or perfectly dangerous for
wolf attacks. The beasts. First recorded victor him in the
Javadon was a fourteen year old named Jean Boulet, who
(04:05):
was killed while watching over livestock at the end of
June seventeen sixty four, and then on August eighth, 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,
(04:29):
and because some of these in 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 known as generality. By October, the generality
(04:53):
second in command, Etienne la France, 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 homes
(05:15):
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 active
(05:38):
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 in people's 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 faro a general, sort of generic
(06:02):
description of a ferocious beast, to talking about the bet
with a capital B or lament 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
beast decapitated a twenty year old woman on October seven,
(06:24):
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. Newspaper started describing the beast as being
deliberately bloodthirsty, apparently drinking the victim's blood from their next
(06:49):
before moving on to the flesh. Etienne la Fonte advised
the women and children tending the flox that they be
escorted at all times by armed men, and this some
fortunately opened the door to some victim blaming. The economy
in this part of France was still really feudial. Men
and women and children all had work to do, and
(07:09):
all of 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,
(07:33):
and 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
(07:56):
dealing with a normal wolf. Eye witness accounts really varied
dramatically and what the beast 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
(08:17):
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
(08:38):
of fearsome monkeys that did exactly this kind of thing,
which makes me go, really, I'm like quade, 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 a menagerie. Um. This theory was actually a source
(09:02):
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 that would be more of an unknown slightly less
(09:23):
brightening yeah. 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 and came to the conclusion
(09:45):
that it had somehow survived their gunfire. This contributed 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 horrified, ring newspapers
became increasingly sensational in their coverage of it. Here's an
(10:05):
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 a grizzly move, began
(10:28):
using the remains of the beast's 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 in all of this, Holly,
(10:49):
would you like to take a moment for a brief
word from a sponsor and would Indeed, in December, the
dragoons led by Jehan Baptist Damel found what they thought
was the beast while they were hunting through the forest.
(11:12):
Doom L himself was prepared to fire on it he
had it in his sights, but the other men, not
realizing what was going on, 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
(11:35):
had a little bit of an ego element in the
in the mix. He 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
(11:57):
was just the first of many of Doomel's fail years
to capture his quarry. 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,
(12:21):
and a seventeen sixty 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, D M. L started
sending out his dragoons dressed as women to try to
escort women and children about their duties in the fields.
(12:45):
He was hoping that the wolf would mistake them for
a woman in attack, since it mostly attacked women and children. Uh,
this didn't work. I like that the beast could clock
their drag um. On January twelfth, a twelve year old
boy known as porta Fe reportedly chased down the wolf
(13:05):
and attacked it with a bayonet after it had attacked
and dragged off 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
(13:30):
of desperate to 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
(13:52):
thousand people gathered in about one hundred different parishes, and
in spite of their 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
(14:13):
be the beast, it tried to escape down a river.
Villagers in the 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,
(14:33):
and perhaps in an effort to save face, a hunting
party from Malsa 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 Malgia,
(14:55):
to take place on the tenth. As they were hunting,
a teenage girl was killed while feeding her livestock. Duom
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
(15:16):
windy weather, and in spite of their multi day attempt
and with so many hunters on the on the team,
they found nothing. On his return from this hunt, d
am L again tried to explain his failure and retain
his position with a supernatural explanation. According to him, the
(15:37):
beast was a witch or the devil. After all, twenty
thousand men, which he in his telling rounded up to
thirty thou 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 basically wolf Hunter in Chief,
(15:59):
had already been chosen and were on their way to
the Jevadon. Jean Charles Marc Antoine de Vonzelle Donnevale of
Normandy took Jean Baptiste Dummels place in the fight against
the Beast of Jebudon. They arrived in February with Jean
Charles son Jean Francois accompanying his father. The DNA Val
(16:20):
did not get along with the wolf hunters and the Jevadant.
They made demands for help and for accommodations that rankled people.
They were 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
(16:42):
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 were all swagger and did not really have the skills. Meanwhile,
in March, the London Chronicle published an obviously satirical article,
(17:02):
possibly written by Horace Walpole, about the beasts, 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
annoyed the people of France in the monarchy because a
lot of people had been killed in the je Boudon already,
so to kind of make fun of the whole thing
(17:24):
was kind of a slap in the face. We should
put these ears 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
in light of the fact that France was facing facing
international criticism for its failure to take care of this
(17:46):
wolf problem, and King Louis himself was eager to have
this beast killed, The dentevals did not do much in
March or April. They just did not seem to be
in a big hurry. They blamed low cool people for
all manner of ills and for their failure to get
the beast. Meanwhile, there were fourteen deaths over those two months,
(18:10):
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 to be pregnant. She turned to see the
beast attack her six year old, and in a struggle
that went on for several minutes, Varley climbed onto the
(18:30):
beasts 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 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
(18:53):
six year old, unfortunately didn't survive, although the rest of
the family did, and Varley's story spread as one of
heroic tragedy. So she became kind of an emblem of
the need 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
(19:13):
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 victims and leaving them out as bait. This
did not work and once again upset people. Then in
(19:36):
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 another attack happened on May nineteen, they started
trying to seek the protection of the king. At first,
I they were afraid that their actions were going to
(19:57):
catch up with them and that they themselves might come
to harm. They were finally forced to leave town and
their reputations were in shreds. And before we turn to
a little happier part of this story, let's take another
brief moment for a word from a sponsor that sounds grand.
(20:23):
So the Denevals who have been run out of town
were soon replaced by Francois Antoine, who was the king's
gun bearer. He organized hunts with 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
(20:45):
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. On September, Antoine
caught sight of a wolf so big that at first
he thought it was a donkey. From about fifty paces away.
He shot it with a long barreled musket that he
(21:05):
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 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
(21:26):
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 urged people not to drop their guard.
Yet pretty much everyone in the Jevadan who looked at
it agreed that the thing was enormous, and as Antoine
(21:48):
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 offspring
the beast 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
(22:10):
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 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
(22:33):
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 more than two months there were no more
wolf attacks. This is actually a you know, it's stretched
into like. That was two months from when he finished killing,
But it wound up that there weren't any deaths from
(22:55):
when he shot that wolf until December seventh, seventeen sixty
five day, two boys survived a wolf attack while they
were guarding cattle, and then an eleven year old girl
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
(23:17):
also this uh kind of issue of saturation. Everyone also,
while they were quicker to recognize this danger, they were
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
septem s and Jean Shastel killing another one in August
(23:43):
of seventeen sixty seven. Yeah, so almost two years later.
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's had done.
Like owed his example, he rounded people up to I
d this wolf and say that it was the wolf
(24:04):
that had attacked them, and then he sent its body
to Versailles. However, by the time it arrived in 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 Jevudin wolf
(24:25):
loor almost immediately. H In the eighteen eighties, a man
named Pierre Pouchet wrote an enormous history of the wolf.
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
(24:47):
when people realized that Jean Chastel had played a prank
on a wolf hunting party two years before. They had
basically said, hey, is this ground up here safe to
walk on? And he was like, yeah, it's awesome, and
it was actually a bo And so the wolf hunters
sunk into it up to their chests while he laughed
along the sidelines. Uh. There are people who were extremely
(25:10):
suspicious of him now and kind of wonder if he
had trained animals to attack other people, and that that
gap between killing one wolf and uh and another attack
happening was because he was having to retrain another animal
that gets some kind of conspiracy theory ideas not totally sure.
We should call Ben and Madden and see what they think.
(25:33):
We will probably never know for sure if this beast
was actually a wolf, or multiple wolves, 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
(25:54):
to call out fromage because it's a little cheesy, but
it's also really fantastic fun and it has been sink Cassel,
which is the important part for me. Uh and the
Jevadan region is now part of the Department of Logier
that happened after the French Revolution, so that was not
in play when this was going on, right, So that
(26:15):
is the Beast of Jevadon creepy and yeah, the book
that was the primary source on this. Normally, when I
researched episodes, 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
(26:36):
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 dedale about various things that went
on 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 gets into
(27:00):
sort of the beginning of it talks a lot about
how the the search for what was this animal kind
of 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. Thank you
(27:25):
so much for joining us on this Saturday. If you
have heard an email address or a Facebook you are
l or something similar over the course of today's episode.
Since it is from the archive that might be out
of date now, you can email us at history podcast
at how stuff Works dot com, and you can find
us all over social media at missed in History, and
you can subscribe to our show on Apple podcasts, Google podcast,
(27:48):
the I Heart Radio app, and wherever else you listen
to podcasts. Stuff You Missed in History Class is a
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podcasts for my heart Radio, visit my heart Radio app,
Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
(28:09):
H
Happy Saturday, everybody. It is our favorite month of the
show and the best month of the year in my opinion.
And to kick it off, we are going back to
a previous October episode, The Beast of Gevadon, which came
out on October. So in the course of this episode,
we make a passing reference to a website about whether
England was at war with France. And if you get
(00:24):
to that point and you're like, what are they talking about?
Several years ago we basically joked about how England and
France were at war with each other so frequently that
there should just be one of those websites where you
could put in a year and it would tell you
yes or no, were they at war. After we made
that joke, two different listeners made one of these websites.
One of those websites is still active. We will put
(00:44):
a link in the show notes, so enjoy. Welcome to
Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of I
Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Polly Frying. So recently
(01:07):
I asked for Halloween episode suggestions because I had this
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
(01:29):
that I made sure that there was a legitimate academic
source in English that I had access to, I stopped
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, grizzly things, this is frightening and grizzly.
(01:51):
For hundreds of years, wolf attacks in Europe were really
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
(02:12):
healthy wolves. There had even been multiple incidents in this
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
(02:33):
was around animals like sheep or goats that might attract
wolves was considered to be inherently dangerous, but the attacks
that struck the Jevadan 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.
(02:56):
The men were generally left alone and when they were
doing the exact same work. The beasts 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
(03:19):
scared of wolves, but they were terrified of this beast um,
which is 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,
(03:44):
There were lots of rocky outcroppings, and all of this
put it UH kind of made it UH an area
that was sort of perfect for or perfectly dangerous for
wolf attacks. The beasts. First recorded victor him in the
Javadon was a fourteen year old named Jean Boulet, who
(04:05):
was killed while watching over livestock at the end of
June seventeen sixty four, and then on August eighth, 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,
(04:29):
and because some of these in 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 known as generality. By October, the generality
(04:53):
second in command, Etienne la France, 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 homes
(05:15):
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 active
(05:38):
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 in people's 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 faro a general, sort of generic
(06:02):
description of a ferocious beast, to talking about the bet
with a capital B or lament 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
beast decapitated a twenty year old woman on October seven,
(06:24):
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. Newspaper started describing the beast as being
deliberately bloodthirsty, apparently drinking the victim's blood from their next
(06:49):
before moving on to the flesh. Etienne la Fonte advised
the women and children tending the flox that they be
escorted at all times by armed men, and this some
fortunately opened the door to some victim blaming. The economy
in this part of France was still really feudial. Men
and women and children all had work to do, and
(07:09):
all of 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,
(07:33):
and 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
(07:56):
dealing with a normal wolf. Eye witness accounts really varied
dramatically and what the beast 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
(08:17):
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
(08:38):
of fearsome monkeys that did exactly this kind of thing,
which makes me go, really, I'm like quade, 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 a menagerie. Um. This theory was actually a source
(09:02):
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 that would be more of an unknown slightly less
(09:23):
brightening yeah. 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 and came to the conclusion
(09:45):
that it had somehow survived their gunfire. This contributed 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 horrified, ring newspapers
became increasingly sensational in their coverage of it. Here's an
(10:05):
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 a grizzly move, began
(10:28):
using the remains of the beast's 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 in all of this, Holly,
(10:49):
would you like to take a moment for a brief
word from a sponsor and would Indeed, in December, the
dragoons led by Jehan Baptist Damel found what they thought
was the beast while they were hunting through the forest.
(11:12):
Doom L himself was prepared to fire on it he
had it in his sights, but the other men, not
realizing what was going on, 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
(11:35):
had a little bit of an ego element in the
in the mix. He 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
(11:57):
was just the first of many of Doomel's fail years
to capture his quarry. 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,
(12:21):
and a seventeen sixty 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, D M. L started
sending out his dragoons dressed as women to try to
escort women and children about their duties in the fields.
(12:45):
He was hoping that the wolf would mistake them for
a woman in attack, since it mostly attacked women and children. Uh,
this didn't work. I like that the beast could clock
their drag um. On January twelfth, a twelve year old
boy known as porta Fe reportedly chased down the wolf
(13:05):
and attacked it with a bayonet after it had attacked
and dragged off 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
(13:30):
of desperate to 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
(13:52):
thousand people gathered in about one hundred different parishes, and
in spite of their 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
(14:13):
be the beast, it tried to escape down a river.
Villagers in the 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,
(14:33):
and perhaps in an effort to save face, a hunting
party from Malsa 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 Malgia,
(14:55):
to take place on the tenth. As they were hunting,
a teenage girl was killed while feeding her livestock. Duom
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
(15:16):
windy weather, and in spite of their multi day attempt
and with so many hunters on the on the team,
they found nothing. On his return from this hunt, d
am L again tried to explain his failure and retain
his position with a supernatural explanation. According to him, the
(15:37):
beast was a witch or the devil. After all, twenty
thousand men, which he in his telling rounded up to
thirty thou 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 basically wolf Hunter in Chief,
(15:59):
had already been chosen and were on their way to
the Jevadon. Jean Charles Marc Antoine de Vonzelle Donnevale of
Normandy took Jean Baptiste Dummels place in the fight against
the Beast of Jebudon. They arrived in February with Jean
Charles son Jean Francois accompanying his father. The DNA Val
(16:20):
did not get along with the wolf hunters and the Jevadant.
They made demands for help and for accommodations that rankled people.
They were 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
(16:42):
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 were all swagger and did not really have the skills. Meanwhile,
in March, the London Chronicle published an obviously satirical article,
(17:02):
possibly written by Horace Walpole, about the beasts, 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
annoyed the people of France in the monarchy because a
lot of people had been killed in the je Boudon already,
so to kind of make fun of the whole thing
(17:24):
was kind of a slap in the face. We should
put these ears 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
in light of the fact that France was facing facing
international criticism for its failure to take care of this
(17:46):
wolf problem, and King Louis himself was eager to have
this beast killed, The dentevals did not do much in
March or April. They just did not seem to be
in a big hurry. They blamed low cool people for
all manner of ills and for their failure to get
the beast. Meanwhile, there were fourteen deaths over those two months,
(18:10):
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 to be pregnant. She turned to see the
beast attack her six year old, and in a struggle
that went on for several minutes, Varley climbed onto the
(18:30):
beasts 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 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
(18:53):
six year old, unfortunately didn't survive, although the rest of
the family did, and Varley's story spread as one of
heroic tragedy. So she became kind of an emblem of
the need 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
(19:13):
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 victims and leaving them out as bait. This
did not work and once again upset people. Then in
(19:36):
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 another attack happened on May nineteen, they started
trying to seek the protection of the king. At first,
I they were afraid that their actions were going to
(19:57):
catch up with them and that they themselves might come
to harm. They were finally forced to leave town and
their reputations were in shreds. And before we turn to
a little happier part of this story, let's take another
brief moment for a word from a sponsor that sounds grand.
(20:23):
So the Denevals who have been run out of town
were soon replaced by Francois Antoine, who was the king's
gun bearer. He organized hunts with 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
(20:45):
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. On September, Antoine
caught sight of a wolf so big that at first
he thought it was a donkey. From about fifty paces away.
He shot it with a long barreled musket that he
(21:05):
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 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
(21:26):
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 urged people not to drop their guard.
Yet pretty much everyone in the Jevadan who looked at
it agreed that the thing was enormous, and as Antoine
(21:48):
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 offspring
the beast 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
(22:10):
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 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
(22:33):
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 more than two months there were no more
wolf attacks. This is actually a you know, it's stretched
into like. That was two months from when he finished killing,
But it wound up that there weren't any deaths from
(22:55):
when he shot that wolf until December seventh, seventeen sixty
five day, two boys survived a wolf attack while they
were guarding cattle, and then an eleven year old girl
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
(23:17):
also this uh kind of issue of saturation. Everyone also,
while they were quicker to recognize this danger, they were
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
septem s and Jean Shastel killing another one in August
(23:43):
of seventeen sixty seven. Yeah, so almost two years later.
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's had done.
Like owed his example, he rounded people up to I
d this wolf and say that it was the wolf
(24:04):
that had attacked them, and then he sent its body
to Versailles. However, by the time it arrived in 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 Jevudin wolf
(24:25):
loor almost immediately. H In the eighteen eighties, a man
named Pierre Pouchet wrote an enormous history of the wolf.
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
(24:47):
when people realized that Jean Chastel had played a prank
on a wolf hunting party two years before. They had
basically said, hey, is this ground up here safe to
walk on? And he was like, yeah, it's awesome, and
it was actually a bo And so the wolf hunters
sunk into it up to their chests while he laughed
along the sidelines. Uh. There are people who were extremely
(25:10):
suspicious of him now and kind of wonder if he
had trained animals to attack other people, and that that
gap between killing one wolf and uh and another attack
happening was because he was having to retrain another animal
that gets some kind of conspiracy theory ideas not totally sure.
We should call Ben and Madden and see what they think.
(25:33):
We will probably never know for sure if this beast
was actually a wolf, or multiple wolves, 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
(25:54):
to call out fromage because it's a little cheesy, but
it's also really fantastic fun and it has been sink Cassel,
which is the important part for me. Uh and the
Jevadan region is now part of the Department of Logier
that happened after the French Revolution, so that was not
in play when this was going on, right, So that
(26:15):
is the Beast of Jevadon creepy and yeah, the book
that was the primary source on this. Normally, when I
researched episodes, 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
(26:36):
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 dedale about various things that went
on 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 gets into
(27:00):
sort of the beginning of it talks a lot about
how the the search for what was this animal kind
of 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. Thank you
(27:25):
so much for joining us on this Saturday. If you
have heard an email address or a Facebook you are
l or something similar over the course of today's episode.
Since it is from the archive that might be out
of date now, you can email us at history podcast
at how stuff Works dot com, and you can find
us all over social media at missed in History, and
you can subscribe to our show on Apple podcasts, Google podcast,
(27:48):
the I Heart Radio app, and wherever else you listen
to podcasts. Stuff You Missed in History Class is a
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(28:09):
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