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For three years, something killed people in the hills of south-central France, and nobody could agree on what it was. Between 1764 and 1767, in the old province of Gévaudan, a predator attacked roughly 210 people and killed somewhere near 100 of them, mostly shepherds, children, and women working alone in fields far from any village. This is not a folk tale passed down by firesides. It is a documented event, tracked in parish burial records, royal correspondence, and newspaper dispatches that reached Paris and eventually the desk of King Louis XV himself.
The killings started in June 1764, when a woman near the village of Langogne reported being charged by a huge animal that her cattle managed to fend off. Weeks later, a fourteen-year-old girl became the first confirmed fatality. What followed was a pattern that terrified the region: victims were frequently decapitated, and witnesses described an animal that ignored livestock and went specifically for people, often striking in daylight rather than under cover of night. Wolves in that era were common and occasionally dangerous, but this behavior was strange enough that local accounts began referring to the animal only as “la Bête” — the Beast.
Descriptions varied by witness, which is itself part of the historical record rather than a gap in it. Survivors and onlookers described a creature larger than a wolf, with reddish fur, a stripe down its back, an elongated snout, and in some accounts a doglike bark. No two sketches from the period agree completely, and that inconsistency has fueled three centuries of argument about what the animal actually was.
A crisis serious enough for a royal response
By late 1764, the deaths had become a political problem, not just a local one. Provincial authorities were struggling to contain the panic, and the story had spread through gazettes across France and into other countries. The crown authorized a bounty of 2,700 livres for whoever killed the Beast, a sum equivalent to roughly a year's wages for a working man at the time. Dragoons were dispatched to hunt it. Local militias organized mass beats through the countryside. None of it worked for long.
In September 1765, Louis XV sent his own lieutenant of the hunt, François Antoine, to end the crisis directly. Antoine's party shot a large wolf near the Chazes forest, along with what were described as its mate and cub. The animal was stuffed, put on display at the royal court in Versailles, and presented as the Beast, finally dead. Antoine was rewarded and the story was declared closed.
It wasn't. Attacks resumed within a couple of months, and over the following year and a half roughly thirty more people died. Whatever had been killed near Chazes, the killing in Gévaudan itself continued.
The second kill, and the end of the attacks
The final chapter came in June 1767. A local nobleman, the Marquis d'Apcher, organized another hunt after a fresh wave of attacks, and on June 19 a farmer named Jean Chastel shot an animal on the slopes of Mont Mouchet. Witnesses who examined the body described a wolf, but an unusual one — with a build and coat pattern hunters in the region said they had never seen on an ordinary wolf. After Chastel's kill, the attacks in Gévaudan stopped for good, and they never resumed.
That single fact — three years of sustained, targeted killing that ended abruptly after Chastel's shot — is the strongest piece of physical evidence historians have. It doesn't prove what species the animal was, but it strongly suggests the deaths had a single ongoing cause rather than a wave of scattered wolf incidents or a hidden human serial killer, a theory some later writers proposed based on the Beast's apparent selectivity toward human victims over livestock.
What historians think today
Modern researchers who have worked through the surviving parish and court records, notably historian Jay M. Smith in his book on the case, generally favor a wolf explanation, though not a simple one. The most-cited theory is that Gévaudan was dealing with an unusually aggressive wolf, or a small number of wolves, possibly suffering from an untreated wound or a condition that pushed it toward human prey when normal game became harder to catch. Others have pointed to the animal's reported coat and build and floated an escaped exotic predator, such as a striped hyena kept privately and released or escaped — a theory that fits some of the physical descriptions but not the animal's total absence from any customs or import record of the period. No theory accounts for every witness description, because the witness descriptions themselves don't fully agree, which is exactly why the case has remained an open historical question rather than a solved one for over 250 years.
What isn't in dispute is the death toll, the royal bounty, the two named hunters, and the abrupt end of the killings after Chastel's 1767 shot. Those are matters of record, not legend.
Learn More
Readers interested in going deeper into the case can find detailed English-language accounts of the Gévaudan investigation, including maps of the attacks and period illustrations, in books covering 18th-century French history and unsolved animal-attack cases. If you want a physical reference for your own research shelf, you can browse relevant titles here: French history and true crime books on Amazon.
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