Case file CR-0049 · land

The Beast of Gévaudan

DOCUMENTED MAN-EATER

land / Margeride and Lozère, France

The Carcasses Nobody Kept

Attacks ran from June 1764 to June 1767; the counts differ by who was counting, from some sixty dead to more than a hundred. The crown sent hunters and posted a royal bounty, and in September 1765 François Antoine shot a large wolf at Chazes, presented it at Versailles and was richly rewarded — whereupon the attacks resumed about ten weeks later. In June 1767 Jean Chastel killed the second animal; it was necropsied the next day and buried unstuffed.

Two official closures, two carcasses, and neither of them kept. No test is possible now.

Source on file
Smith, Monsters of the Gévaudan (Harvard UP, 2011)

AI illustration · imagined scene, not an evidence photograph — The Beast of Gévaudan — AI illustration · imagined scene, not an evidence photograph

File: CR-0049
Date: 1764 → 1767
Place: Margeride and Lozère, France
Record: a province, over roughly 90 by 80 kilometres
Evidence: A royal hunt record, a sworn notary's report, and no specimen
Agency: Louis XV's hunters; the Marin Report, French National Archives
Assessment: B · documented, unresolved

The full file

On 30 June 1764 Jeanne Boulet, aged fourteen, was killed near Les Hubacs, close to Langogne, in the Margeride uplands of the old province of Gévaudan, now mostly the Lozère. Over the next three years people across the province and its borders with the Vivarais, Rouergue and Auvergne were attacked by what the parish registers, the bishop of Mende and the press came to call la bête, the beast. The attacks ended in June 1767. In between, the crown declared the animal dead once, the killing resumed, and a local man finally shot a large canid that nobody kept.

What was reported

Victims were attacked mostly at the throat; witnesses saw some carried off, and bodies were found partly eaten, dismembered or decapitated. The count depends on who is counting: one 1987 study gave 210 attacks, 113 dead and 49 injured; the Mende tourist office gives between 82 and 124 victims; other accounts give from about sixty to a hundred dead. By the end of 1765, Graham Robb noted, the beast was credited with about sixty deaths.

The affair became news well beyond the province. On 31 December 1764 Bishop Gabriel-Florent de Choiseul-Beaupré issued a mandate treating the beast as a divine scourge. The Courrier d'Avignon ran ninety-eight articles on it in thirteen months. After a group of children led by Jacques Portefaix drove the animal off on 12 January 1765, Louis XV rewarded them, and a bounty of 6,000 livres was reported on the beast's head.

The evidence and where it is held

Three animals killed during the hunts were described in writing at the time. On 20 September 1765 François Antoine, the king's gunbearer, shot a large grey wolf near the royal abbey of Les Chazes. A surgeon, Charles Jaladon, recorded it in a report of 27 September; the animal was stuffed, sent to Versailles and shown at court, and Antoine was rewarded. Accounts differ on the day, 20 or 21 September. A further animal, shot at the Bois Noir in late August 1765 by a gamekeeper named Rainchard, survives only in papers of the Tournon family.

On 19 June 1767 Jean Chastel, a local hunter, killed a large canid during a hunt organised by the Marquis d'Apcher, in the woods of the Ténazeyre, on the slopes of Mont Mouchet at a place now called the Sogne d'Auvers. The next day, at the Château de Besque, a surgeon from Saugues examined the incomplete body and the royal notary Roch Étienne Marin wrote up his findings. The Marin report records a canid's dental formula, measurements, a weight of 109 livres (about 53 kg) and, in the stomach, what it called the head of a child's femur. The report is held at the Archives nationales in Paris and was published in 1958 in the Revue du Gévaudan after Élise Seguin found it there.

Neither carcass survives. Chastel's animal was sent to the king and had decayed badly by the time it reached Versailles in early August 1767. Buffon left no written opinion. The only account of his view, that it was nothing more than a large wolf, comes from the later testimony of the servant who carried it, and no record says where the remains were kept or buried. No specimen can now be tested.

What investigators concluded

At the time the crown twice treated the matter as closed: in 1765 on Antoine's wolf, while attacks resumed near Saugues and Lorcières in December, and in 1767 on Chastel's animal, after which the attacks stopped. Jay M. Smith's 2011 history from Harvard University Press treats the episode chiefly as a story of public opinion and official response. Reviewing it, Robb described how the affair looked by 1765, when it was increasingly obvious that the monster was "probably just an unusually big wolf, or several wolves".

The fullest anatomical study is François-Louis Pelissier's 2024 comparison of the three archival descriptions, published in Scepticisme scientifique. It found all three to be canids, judged the Chazes animal probably a wolf and the 1767 animal "strongly identified as a wolf", and left the Bois Noir animal undetermined. The historian Jean-Marc Moriceau's 2021 study, built on five departmental archives and the national wolf-bounty files, likewise treats it as a wolf episode.

The conventional explanation

The leading explanation is that the attacks were the work of one or more large wolves, possibly with wolf-dog hybrids among them, preying on people working in the open. Its strengths are the dental formulae in two surgeons' reports, a weight within the range of other recorded French wolves, and wound patterns and victim profiles that match documented predatory wolf attacks. Its weaknesses are that witnesses described features hard to fit a wolf; that both reports came from incomplete bodies; and that no specimen survives to confirm them.

What remains disputed

The number of animals is unresolved; the estimates are debated, but Pelissier notes that they imply more than two. Whether the wolves were rabid is disputed: one reviewer of Smith's book favoured rabid packs, while the absence of rabies among the victims is cited against that reading, and Pelissier places the attacks among predatory, not rabid, ones. Pelissier found no anatomical support for a hybrid, but could not rule one out. Alternatives, among them a lion, a hyena and a human killer with a trained animal, rest on witness descriptions, not on the surviving reports. The silver bullet and Chastel's prayer belong to later literature, not the contemporary record.

Sources

Essai d'anatomie comparée de trois « Bêtes du Gévaudan » (archived) — François-Louis Pelissier, Muséum départemental du Var, Scepticisme scientifique 2, 2024. The three described animals, the Marin report data, archive references and the canid and wolf identifications.
Review of Monsters of the Gévaudan: The Making of a Beast (archived) — Joan B. Landes, American Historical Review 118(2), 2013. Smith's approach, about sixty victims to late 1765, and the rabid-wolf reading.
And what did she see? (archived) — Graham Robb, London Review of Books 33(10), 2011. The Courrier d'Avignon coverage, Antoine's wolf at court and how the affair looked by 1765.
The Beast of Gévaudan (archived) — Office de tourisme Mende Cœur de Lozère. The 82 to 124 victim range, the bishop's mandate, the two kills and the Buffon testimony.
La bête du Gévaudan, mythe et réalités — Jean-Louis Beaucarnot, Revue française de généalogie, 2021. Moriceau's 2021 study and the archives it draws on.
The Beast of Gévaudan: theories — Joseph A. Williams, History.com, 2020. The 6,000-livre bounty, the December 1765 resumption and the range of alternative theories.

Revisions

Last revised 10 October 2026. Every correction to the archive

10 October 2026 Corrected The full file: Chastel's animal is now described as sent to the king and badly decayed on reaching Versailles in early August 1767, with Buffon's reported view coming from the servant who carried it; the earlier claim that the remains were thought to be buried in Paris now reads that no record says where they were kept or buried, as the Mende tourist office states.
10 October 2026 Corrected The full file: Graham Robb's phrase "probably just an unusually big wolf, or several wolves" describes how the affair looked by 1765, not his own conclusion as a reviewer; the text and source note now say so.
10 October 2026 Corrected The full file: The 210 attacks, 113 dead and 49 injured figure was attributed to de Beaufort; the sources consulted give it only as a 1987 study, so the text now says that.
10 October 2026 Corrected The full file: The text said seven children led by Jacques Portefaix drove the beast off; accounts differ between seven children in all and Portefaix plus seven others, so it now says a group of children led by Portefaix.
10 October 2026 Corrected The full file: Removed the unsupported claim that witnesses' descriptions kept the non-wolf idea alive at the time, and the remark that sources cite the Marin report under different references.
10 October 2026 Corrected The attacks resumed about ten weeks after Antoine's wolf was shot, not within weeks.
10 October 2026 Corrected The claim that ninety-nine wolves were destroyed in Gévaudan in a single year has been removed as unconfirmed, and the royal bounty and Antoine's reward are no longer given as exact sums.
10 October 2026 Added The full file, a long-form write-up with its sources, added.

Read the full write-up