Les chasseurs luttent contre la Bête du Gévaudan

Francette Vigneron & Laurent Miny

The Beast of Gévaudan

Book Francette Vigneron & Laurent Miny The Beast of ‍Gévaudan

If you try to find Gévaudan in a list of the regions and Departements of France, you will be wasting your time.

Gévaudan no longer exists.


It disappeared during the French Revolution when the present departements were created.. Gévaudan was a province under the Ancien Régime which occupied nearly all of what is now Lozère, the southern part of Haute-Loire and a small section of Cantal.

At the time when the man-eating 'Beast' was beginning to be the topic on everybody's lips, Louis XV, King of France, was 54 years old. For four years, from 1764 to 1767, an unidentified animal preyed on the population of Gévaudan; its victims numbered more than a hundred, many of whom were women and children..

What exactly was this creature? Some people think the perpetrator of these attacks can only have been a wolf . However, this is a theory which is widely contested..

The atrocities of the Beast of Gévaudan became a matter of state importance in the 18th century and to this day they continue to haunt the minds and divide the opinions of the thousands of addicts worldwide seeking to solve the mystery of its identity.


Year of publication of the presented edition : 2007

Editor : Ouest France

The author :

Although she was born in the 11th arrondissement of Paris (1954), Francette Vigneron's family roots are in Corrèze, where she has lived since 1991. A former journalist, she is passionate about psychocriminology and the history of criminal cases. She devoted a book to the affair of the anonymous letters from Tulle, L'Œil de tigre, from which she unearthed the investigation file (which was said to have been destroyed or stolen...), thus allowing readers to discover for the first time the whole truth about this famous affair which had so fascinated France between 1917 and 1920. She regularly gives lectures on the subject. Recently, she participated in the symposium organized by the Singer-Polignac Foundation: Corbeaux et anonymographes. (Crows and anonymographers)

Book Francette Vigneron & Laurent Miny The Beast of ‍Gévaudan

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