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It was 1764. Louis XV sat on the throne of the Bourbon Kingdom of France. In 1789, Louis’ grandson, Louis XVI would abdicate the throne as the French Revolution swept the land. However, 25 years before the epochal event, a terror seized France. It was caused by an animal, known popularly as the ‘Beast of Gevaudan’.
In a spate of attacks between 1764 and 1767, the ‘Beast’ (La Bete in French) killed approximately 100 people (according to biologist Karl-Hans Taake) in the Gevaudan region. This area is part of the modern-day French departments of Lozère, Cantal and Haute-Loire in southern France, inland from the Mediterranean coast.
The creature, or whatever was causing the attacks, caught the attention of the press in France and other western countries.
A number of theories have been attributed as to why the ‘Beast’ hogged media spotlight from 1764-1767, much like Uttar Pradesh’s Bahraich has in these past few weeks.
Many of the victims of the ‘Beast’ were found with their throats torn open. The animal’s area of operation was some of the roughest country in France. One portal describes it as “being made up of moors and grazing meadows punctuated by groves and a few thin forests”.
The same website also cites France’s loss in the just-concluded Seven Years’ War (1756-1763) to its eternal foe, Great Britain, as a reason for the interest in the media coverage.
“The end of the Seven Years’ War left a gaping void in the editorials of the newspapers, until the Gazette d’Avignon took over the affair. Its editor skillfully embellished the rather deficient news that came from the field,” the portal notes.
The intense coverage pushed the king to act. Hunters, including the king’s Gun-Bearer and Lieutenant of the Hunt, François Antoine, scoured the countryside looking for the animal.
Between June and October 1765, Antoine killed a wolf that was believed by many to be the Beast. He followed it with killing a female and pups.
It was believed that the Beast had been brought to justice. But the attacks started again and continued till June 1767. That was when Jean Chastel, a local hunter, shot an animal believed to be the Beast. The attacks stopped after this.
For 250 years, the identity of the animal that killed people in the south of France has been a mystery. Various hypotheses have been suggested: the beast could have been a wolf, a dog, a wolfdog hybrid, a striped hyena or even a young lion!
An autopsy of the animal was done by a local surgeon. His post-mortem report was transcribed by a notary of the court, Roch Etienne Marin and is known as the ‘Marin Report’.
While the surgeon concluded that the Beast appeared to be a large wolf or wolfdog, he had not received the complete remains and hence complete surety on the identity of the animal was not reached.
The remains were later buried in an unknown location never disclosed, which is why identification through DNA is not an option at the moment.
Karl-Hans Taake, who is the author of the 2015 work The Gévaudan Tragedy: The Disastrous Campaign of a Deported ‘Beast’, believes that the Beast was neither a wolf nor a wolfdog but a young, subadult lion, which had escaped from a royal menagerie or a travelling circus and had started attacking the residents of Gevaudan.
In his 2020 paper Biology of the "Beast of Gévaudan": Morphology, Habitat Use, and Hunting Behaviour of an 18th Century Man-Eating Carnivore, Taake offers various reasons for his hypothesis.
One was that surviving victims, other eyewitnesses, and hunters reported having seen a large carnivore that had upright hair on the back of its head and neck and a dark line along its spine.
“Both features are among the best-documented traits of the Beast: witnesses described these and other revealing features on different occasions, usually in their own words. A dark line and upright hair at the neck, a so-called Mohawk mane, are characteristics which occur in lions,” Taake notes in his paper.
He adds that the countryside traversed by the Beast was optimal wolf habitat and may have had several resident wolf packs. No pack could infringe on another’s territory. But the Beast had gone from one end of the huge area to the other to kill its victims. This meant it was not a wolf or wolves but something else.
Taake also observes that most of the victims of the Beast were adult humans and not children. Most wolf victims during that period in France and the rest of Europe were young children, records showed.
Only a predator or carnivore with a size and power much more than a wolf or a canid could kill adult humans by suffocating them in the neck or decapitating them — a technique used by ‘pantherine’ cats like tigers, lions, leopards and jaguars.