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  • Monsters of the Gévaudan: The Making of a Beast
  • Sarah Maza
Monsters of the Gévaudan: The Making of a Beast. By Jay M. Smith (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011. 378 pp. $35.00).

The monster is back! As if to greet the publication of Jay Smith’s new book, a killer of sheep nicknamed the “Beast of the Vosges” cut a swath in June 2011 through the flocks of eastern France leaving in its wake a string of woolly corpses and a flurry of speculation as to whether or not the predator was a wolf. The context is much different now than it was in the 1760s as wolves, which have all but disappeared from the French countryside since the 1930s, have since been granted their own status as victims of human predation. But the [End Page 598] mythical Bête du Gévaudan still casts a long shadow over all such subsequent occurrences.

The essentials of the story of the Beast, if not its details, are known to most people in France. In 1764–65 at least sixty people, mostly women and children, were gruesomely killed, often decapitated and devoured, by an attacker (or possibly several) emerging from the depths of the forests. These events occurred in the wild and mountainous Gévaudan region of south-central France, and were attributed by the locals and then by the press to a single killer. Survivors of the attacks maintained that “it” was no ordinary wolf but a monstrous creature the size of a young bull with an elongated muzzle, sparkling eyes, talons on its feet and a long snake-like tail. The local and then royal authorities set about tracking down the monster, organizing well-publicized hunts involving thousands of villagers led by would-be heroes, which initially met with a humiliating lack of success. Finally, in the fall of 1765 a royal gun-bearer named François Antoine tracked down and killed a large wolf which, declared to be the Beast, was embalmed and shipped up to Versailles for a much-ballyhooed public viewing at court. (Horace Walpole, a skeptic from the start, was present for the viewing and happily declared the Beast to be “not more above the common size” than his portly acquaintance Mrs. Cavendish.) Attacks on villagers continued, but the matter of the Beast was officially declared over.

There already exist many books about the Beast, of course, mostly written by local historians and specialists in the history of the peasantry and folklore, all of them in French. The more traditional of these works re-hash the debate which raged in the 1760: one very large and hungry wolf, a pack of wolves, an exotic beast like a hyena, or some sort of monstrous or even supernatural hybrid? Since the nineteenth century, most accounts of the story have anchored it firmly in the French contes et légendes tradition of regionalism and folk cultures, serving it up as a nostalgic reminder of a bygone age of superstition.

One of the great merits of Smith’s account, the first English-language history of this episode, is his foregrounding of elite involvement, both at the local and at the national level, in the Gévaudan events. The Beast was not a figment of benighted rural imaginations; it acquired international fame in its day because royal administrators, journalists, scientists, military officers and various self-designated heroes all wanted a piece of the action. Nor was the timing of the events irrelevant. Such predations had been occurring for centuries, but it took the convergence in the early 1760s of a military fiasco, religious strife, enterprising journalism, and the high noon of the Enlightenment for this series of killings to take on the aura they did. Smith expertly unravels the various strands that would come together in, as his subtitle puts it, the making of a Beast.

Certainly the wild countryside of the Gévaudan, with its isolated peasant communities, menacing landscapes, and persistent legends of werewolves, was an ideal setting for the scarily supernatural. But monsters, Smith reminds us, were a serious object of discussion and investigation among leading natural scientists of the time: Maupertuis...

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