The Beast of Gévaudan is the name given to the man-eating animal or animals that terrorized the former province of Gévaudan (now Lozère and part of Haute-Loire), in the Margeride Mountains of south-central France, between 30 June 1764 and 19 June 1767. Witnesses described something the size of a calf, tawny or russet with dark stripes, a dark stripe down its back and a tail longer than a wolf’s, bounding across fields as if flying. A striped hyena, a large wolf, a large dog and a wolfdog have all been proposed; its identity remains unsolved.
Counts differ by source. A 1987 study estimated 210 attacks, with 113 deaths and 49 injuries, and 98 of the dead partly eaten. Victims were most often lone men, women and children tending livestock, killed by having their throats torn out; the first official victim was fourteen-year-old Jeanne Boulet. The Bishop of Mende declared the beast a scourge sent by God to punish sin and called for prayer and penance, and Louis XV ordered the state to hunt it down.
In 1765 the royal huntsman François Antoine killed a large wolf and the attacks seemed to end, but they resumed. They finally stopped after 19 June 1767, when the local hunter Jean Chastel shot an animal during a hunt organized by the Marquis d’Apcher. The stories that he prayed before firing, and that he used silver bullets cast from medals of the Virgin, came later; the silver bullets are the literary invention of the writer Henri Pourrat.