Curated Silver

The Beast of Gévaudan and the silver bullet

Between 1764 and 1767, something stalked the remote hills of the Gévaudan, in what is now the Lozère in south-central France. It attacked shepherds, farm girls and children tending cattle, and it killed around a hundred people. Witnesses described a wolf-like creature, but far bigger than any wolf, with a reddish coat, a dark stripe down its back and a long, whipping tail. It hunted by day and seemed to go for the head and throat. Some said it walked on its hind legs.

The terror became national news. Newspapers in Paris, and soon across Europe, carried every gory report. Louis XV sent dragoons, then professional wolf-hunters, and finally his own gun-bearer, François Antoine. In September 1765 Antoine shot an enormous wolf, had it stuffed and paraded at Versailles, and the king declared the matter closed. Within months, the killing began again.

It finally ended on 19 June 1767. During a hunt on the slopes of Mont Mouchet organised by a local nobleman, the Marquis d'Apcher, a farmer and innkeeper named Jean Chastel shot a large animal. The attacks stopped. Chastel was the hero of the Gévaudan.

This is where silver enters the story. Ask almost anyone today how Chastel killed the Beast, and they will tell you it was with a silver bullet, perhaps cast from a melted medallion of the Virgin Mary and blessed by a priest. It is the perfect ending, and it helped fix the silver bullet into werewolf lore for good.

The trouble is that it never happened. None of the accounts from 1767 mention silver at all. Even a detailed 1889 history by a local priest, which describes Chastel's piety and his blessed musket balls, says nothing about silver. The idea seems to have crept in later, through novels and retellings: an 1858 novel by Élie Berthet, and in the 20th century the French writer Henri Pourrat. Paranormal books of the 1960s repeated it, and then everyone did.

The silver itself was never practical. It is lighter than lead, melts at a far higher temperature and was much too valuable to fire at a wolf. But that was never the point. Silver had long been seen as pure, holy and protective against evil, so in the imagination only silver could finish off something so unnatural.

As for the Beast, nobody knows. Theories range from a pack of large wolves, to an escaped lion or hyena, to a human killer hiding behind the legend.

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