Monsters of the Gevaudan: The Making of a Beast.

Lynn, Michael R.

Monsters of the Gevaudan: The Making of a Beast, by Jay M. Smith. Cambridge, Massachusetts, Harvard University Press, 2011. 378 pp. $35.00 US (cloth).

People living in the Gevaudan region of France during the 1760s found themselves confronted with a horrible beast which ravaged the countryside. This animal--alternately described as a wolf, lynx, hyena, or wolf-dog hybrid, among many other classifications--attacked women and children who worked as shepherds; in the end, at least sixty people died. Scholars have offered numerous versions of this story in a futile attempt to determine the exact nature of the animal responsible. In Monsters of the Gevaudan: The Making of a Beast, Jay M. Smith shifts the focus away from identifying the beast and instead uses this event to grapple with an intricate cross-section of issues. Not content to simply engage in a binary discussion of elite versus popular or centre versus periphery, Smith provides a highly contextualized reading of this story in which he places the chief actors into a richly developed political, religious, and cultural milieu.

In the first two substantive chapters, Smith lays out a broad framework. He begins, in the first chapter, by outlining the nature of the problem. While herding sheep and cattle, alone and far from others, was always a risky business, the death of fourteen-year-old Jeanne Boulet in June of 1764 acted as a harbinger of doom. The local community began to organize after additional fatal attacks followed this initial incident. Smith tracks this mobilization from the local to the national levels to illustrate the evolution of a crisis and the manner in which authorities at all levels addressed it. He also explores the categorization of the problem: wolf or were-wolf, animal or monster, the ways in which people thought about this event turned national attention on this particular set of deadly wolf attacks out of the thousands that had occurred during the period from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries. Smith then situates this specific case, in the second chapter, within the broader context of eighteenth-century science, natural history, and the wondrous. This series of attacks sparked national discussions about this animal and how it came to haunt this particular region.

The third chapter moves into the political arena. Here, Smith argues that the beast's widespread appeal depended in large part on the constant attention given it by Francois Morenas, editor of the Courrier d'Avignon. Morenas's newspaper had done very well by capitalizing on the widespread interest in news during the Seven Years' War. With the war over in 1763, Morenas needed something else to hook his readers' attention; the attacks provided the perfect remedy for failing circulation numbers. Smith also argues that French defeats during the Seven Years' War left some army officers in need of restoring their honor. Jean-Baptiste Duhamel, a dragoon captain first named to hunt the beast, had participated in a particularly disastrous battle early on in the war. In the Gevaudan, Smith suggests, Duhamel attempted to redeem himself in the eyes of his peers.

Chapters four through six examine the publicity surrounding the hunt for the beast. The fourth chapter explores how the news spread and the impact of all this attention on the Gevaudan region. By this time Louis XV had offered a reward for the killing of the animal. This turned a lot of attention on the beast from both locals and outsiders hoping to capitalize on the affair. A famed wolf hunter, Jean-Charles d'Enneval arrived in the area in 1765 along with an entourage of men and dogs. In this case, Smith argues in the fifth chapter, d'Enneval's complete failure to work with the local population, much less to kill the beast, made his visit particularly problematic. Smith uses the events in these chapters to demonstrate, in part, the downside of publicity and celebrity. With the eyes of the nation upon them, no one could manage to solve the problem. The sixth chapter begins with the tales of Jacques Portefaix and Jeanne Varlet, who fought back successfully and survived attacks thereby becoming national heroes. Eyewitnesses, however, led to conflicting images of the beast itself and the problems surrounding its identification.

The last two chapters bring both an end to the story and a beginning to the myth. First, Francois Antoine, sent from court, arrived and, before long, killed a wolf. Smith points out that although Antoine initially downplayed his victory and warned he may have killed a different animal, people transformed his wolf into a bizarre and strange animal clearly responsible for the gruesome events of the previous months. Nonetheless, the beast made little impact when displayed at Versailles. Antoine, it turns out, was right to be cautious since wolf attacks recommenced not long after his victory. However, Versailles stepped in at this point and determined that the new attacks were unrelated to the previous problem. Smith then offers a detailed discussion of how the mythology of the beast grew in the following decades and into the nineteenth century.

Overall, Smith offers a fascinating account of the making of this beast. Smith avoids the pitfall of trying to determine the nature and species of the animal and concentrates instead on constructing an archeology of reactions to the problem. Here, Smith sidesteps a second potential analytic problem by avoiding overly simplistic centre/periphery or intellectual elite/superstitious peasant arguments. Instead, he provides a nicely narrated integration of the problem of the beast into the social and cultural issues facing France in the 1760s.

Michael R. Lynn

Purdue University North Central