Weird and Cool Paris History — The Wolves of Paris

[manningkrull]

Hello folks! I've posted here a few times about weird history stuff I've discovered in my life in Paris, most notably my post about the Café de L'Enfer, a Hell-themed café in Paris' red light district in the 19th century. It's great to know there are people out there who appreciate these kinds of things!

I've just launched a new website called

Comments

[heycookie]

I just read about the wolves of Paris incident on Monday! I was telling my husband about The Beast of Gévaudan and looked it up online to get more details. Oddly enough, wolf/indeterminate vicious animal attacks were not unheard of in France, especially during the 1760's...a few very nasty incidents were documented during 1766 alone. This has been fascinating the hell out of me all week, so the timing of your post is a strange coincidence. :)

Love your website, too--it's exactly the sort of thing I need to browse during my daily coffee-consuming ritual. :)

[manningkrull]

Cool! I think I heard about the wolves the same way you did, searching for info about the Beast of Gévaudan a year or two ago. I was hoping to do a big trip in search of the Beast of Gévaudan around this Halloween, but it's not going to work out this year, unfortunately. There are at least three statues and one tiny museum dedicated to Le Bete de Gévaudan, all scattered around the region where the attacks took place (formerly called Gévaudan, nowadays called Lozère). Have you seen the movie Brotherhood of the Wolf? It's not great, but it's about the Le Bete de Gévaudan, and it's pretty fun at least.

[heycookie]

Hmm, I think you may be the 1,871,287th person to recommend "Brotherhood of the Wolf" to me. Perhaps it's time for me to finally check it out... :)

The Beast of Gévaudan is an old obsession of mine from way back when I was just a plaid-skirted little girl at Catholic school. I was quite surprised to discover there were so many similar incidents in France. Have you visited the Lozère region? I'm curious about what it's like there.

[manningkrull]

Ha, well, the film is very, very silly, but it's shot beautifully. As someone who knows the story of the Beast, you'll find some of the history and explanation extremely laughable. Proceed with caution.

I've never been to Lozère, but I've done enough research and traveled enough in France to have a pretty good idea of what it's like: It's the least-populated of the departments of France, so it's basically just lots of forests, mountains, and farmland. A good home for a monster!

[heycookie]

Sorry for the slow response...I was on a trip out of state this past week and did not have my laptop with me. :/

This is a bit irrelevant to the main topic here, but have you ever been to Thiviers? According to Wikipedia there are two wolves of Périgord preserved and on display in a chateau there. It's difficult to tell what they really look like from the wee photo on the wiki, but they do seem a bit unusual from what I can see.

Oh, and I just found a rather comprehensive website devoted to La Bête: http://labete.7hunters.net/
My apologies if you've seen it already--I've only recently started to read about these things on the internet, so it's all new to me. :)