Gévaudan — the Beast

OVERVIEW

The Beast of Gévaudan — la Bête du Gévaudan — is the name given to the man-eating animal, or animals, that attacked people across the old province of Gévaudan, now the department of Lozère and part of Haute-Loire, in the Margeride mountains of south-central France, between 30 June 1764 and 19 June 1767. The attacks covered an area of roughly 90 by 80 kilometres.

HISTORY

The Kingdom of France spent considerable money and manpower on it, committing the resources of several nobles, soldiers, royal huntsmen and local civilians. Victim counts differ by source: a 1987 study put it at 210 attacks with 113 deaths and 49 injuries, 98 of those killed partly eaten; other accounts give 60 to 100 dead. Most of the victims were women and children working alone with livestock.

REPORTED ACTIVITY

The contemporary eyewitness descriptions are the reason this is on the map rather than in a history book. They describe one or more animals of a tawny or russet colour with dark streaks and a dark stripe down the back, a tail longer than a wolf's ending in a tuft, formidable teeth and claws, the size of a calf or a cow, and a way of moving that observers described as seeming to fly or bound across fields at its victims. Wolves, a wolf-dog cross, a trained animal and an escaped exotic have all been argued. The attacks stopped; the identification never settled.

VISITING

Open upland country. The Musée de la Bête du Gévaudan at Saugues covers the case; the villages across the Margeride carry memorials to individual victims.