Monsters of the Gévaudan: The Making of a Beast by Jay M. Smith (review)

SMITH, JAY M. Monsters of the Gévaudan: The Making of a Beast. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2011. ISBN 978-0-674-04716-7. Pp 378. $35. All those interested in the Seven Years War and the Enlightenment will find in Smith’s book a well-written and thoroughly-researched analysis of late eighteenthcentury France. But more than a political, cultural, and intellectual history, the revelations of the “making of a beast” are a riveting set of answers to questions about the nature of “the beast of Gévaudan” and its mythic status. Moreover, as fascinating and mysterious as the exploits of the beast were, Smith approaches the story in a novel way: he analyzes the environment that conditioned human reactions to reports of the sixty victims who died grisly deaths. In so doing, Smith reveals the “attitudes, assumptions, motives, and frustrations of the humans who struggled to understand and defeat the lethal enemy in their midst” (3). The title and subtitle warrant comment. While Smith admits in his intriguing introduction that the singular form of “the beast” is necessarily misleading, the author details the historical characters and events responsible for creating the monsters to which the legendary creature gave form. In the chapters that follow, Smith succeeds in explaining the survival of the powerful legend for over two hundred years. In one chapter, Smith paints the sense of curiosity and adventure that characterized thought during the Enlightenment. He describes the fascination for hybridity and the boundaries of species and asserts that naturalists’ open-ended research fueled public fascination for the exotic and strange beings of all kinds. Further, Smith delves into the animosities that agitated relationships between Catholics and Huguenots and the battle between Jansenists and Jesuits. Thus he provides the spiritually charged backdrop against which the events unfolded. He argues convincingly that the cultural, intellectual, and religious milieu prevailing in France created fertile ground for the myth to flourish. In another, equally absorbing chapter, Smith depicts in an impressive amount of detail the characters who contributed to the myth: a newspaper editor and a captain in the French army. The former reacted to the journalistic opportunities presented by gruesome reports of killings by an unknown beast in a hiatus in news events following the end of the Seven Years War and who “freely tested the limits of credibility” (72). The latter attempted to compensate for injured pride after fighting on the losing side against the Prussians and similarly “allowed imagination to run free” (85) in efforts to fill out the profile of his enemy. In the next three chapters, Smith explores the different ways in which the publicity surrounding the beast’s rampage defined its essence. Fortunately for the reader, these chapters are punctuated with ten black and white reproductions of enthralling prints that represent the fantastic beast; the text is less compelling. In particular, too many words are devoted to the d’Ennevals, a father-and-son team who unsuccessfully tried to destroy the beast. Chapter 7 chronicles “a transformation meeting site where great expectations openly collided with reality” (207): a larger than typical male wolf was shot and killed. The victory over the animal eventually marked the end of immediate interest in the story, but not before the allegedly fantastic character of the creature was further corroborated. “Yet the beast lived” (209) and there were further ravages. In chapter 8 Smith deconstructs the varying responses to the renewal of violence and two competing understandings of the events. As a result of one, the “illuminating historical context came to be forgotten or suppressed” (268), and as a result of the other, the narrative was completely decontextualized. In this book, Reviews 973 Smith effectively recontextualizes the beast of Gévaudan and convinces his readers that the monster was a product of its time. Texas A&M University-Kingsville Jacqueline Thomas Creative Works edited by Nathalie Degroult ANGOT, CHRISTINE. Les petits. Paris: Flammarion, 2011. ISBN 978-2-0812-5364-3. Pp. 188. 17 a. Avec ce roman centré autour d’une figure masculine, l’auteure, qui d’ordinaire se met en scène dans des épisodes intimes où fiction et vécu s’entremêlent, compose un ouvrage dont elle est...