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Wolves in the Loire Valley

 

Wolves in Orléanais (1692))
The Beast of Touraine (February 1693-September 1695)
1742-1755: The Loire Valley Falls Victim Again
Notes and References

 

The Loire Valley was in the red zone most affected by wolf attacks. Aside from attacks on livestock, there were more attacks on humans in this area than anywhere else in mainland France. In the space of three generations, from the mid-17th to the mid-18th century, the inhabitants of Orléanais, Touraine and Anjou suffered brutal episodes of confrontation between men and wolves. The extremely dispersed habitat and the widespread practise of children guarding livestock increased chances of encountering wolves. The abundant game and the variety of livestock attracted many predators.

In this context favouring attacks, there were many incidents. The dramatic periods, already easily visible at the end of the 16th century (as noted by Swiss traveller Thomas Platter near Chambord in 1599), peaked at the time of the great famines under Louis XIV, which put many Tom Thumbs on the road in the last decade of the 17th century (Document 1). With the Enlightenment, and despite a string of hunts and interventions by the royal wolf hunters, man-eating wolves ensured that the Ferocious Beast remained present in the public consciousness.

Nothing seemed to help: the authorities made it legal for at-risk populations to carry weapons, as in the Duchy of Orléans in 1961, launched many hunts, as in the Marquisate of Herbault in 1743, and sent in royal wolf hunters, as in 1700, 1711-1712 and 1748, but none of this brought an end to the attacks. It is true that in these royal lands, with their numerous castles, rivalries between lords, and the competition between the two authorities responsible for wild animals (the Water and Forest Administration and the French wolf hunters, or louveterie), made it very difficult to coordinate efforts. Certain audacious wolves benefitted from this structural weakness.

The last in this long series of tragedies was the “Beast of Chaingy” under the first Restoration, with ten victims in the east of Orléans. A woodcutter killed the flesh-hungry animal near Cercottes on 6 December 1814, bringing an end to this terrible Ancien Régime.

Wolves in Orléanais (1692)

Orléanais - in inner Orléanais, the people of Marigny-les-Usages (Loiret) sent a petition to the king in Summer 1692. As one might expect from this kind of action, they made no attempt to play down the situation, because it followed two years of recurrent attacks. One after another, the villages between the Loire and the southwest edge of the forest of Orléans saw the emergence of “ferocious beasts that feed only on human flesh.”

In the space of two years, from September 1690 to September 1692, around twenty villages suffered repeated attacks. On 29 January 1692, Pasquier, priest of Saint-Jean-de-Braye, indicated upon burying a child from his parish who had been bitten by a wolf that at the time of writing, the animal had already claimed over 50 victims in the forest and in the whole of the Orléans vineyards. In May 1692, the intendant reported “over 150 people attacked or injured” and over 100 deaths occurring immediately or as a result of injuries inflicted by wolves. Four months later, on 26 September, Pasquier attributed over 200 victims to “flesh-hungry wolves, which for three years, have been coming out of the forest day and night” to injure and devour “people of any sex or age that they can”. The total included all those “injured, killed or devoured” in 19 named parishes. By examining parish records around Orléans, 43 death records were found, but the disappearance of certain civil records and archives of the Orléans general hospital for years preceding 1737 makes it impossible to find out more. We can map out a predation zone covering a vast quadrilateral, 28km from east to west and 16km from north to south.

In this space covering over 400km², two types of parishes suffered attacks: those neighbouring the forest, or even within it, and those in the vineyards at the edge of Orléans. The forest area clearly served as a refuge for the predator, with even well-organised hunts not managing to eradicate it. In June and July 1692, the Grand Dauphin’s hunt party, despite their expertise in hunting wolves, caught just three, blaming the fact that “the forest is too vast [and] the wolves hardly leave it” In September 1692, the threat was so great that our Saint-Jean-de-Braye priest, exasperated by the audacity of these wolves, even openly advised his parishioners to carry a rifle, against royal orders. The intendant himself became involved, simultaneously opposing the publication of an order from the Duke of Orléans, banning peasants from holding firearms. In support of this order, it was claimed that “the wild beasts have been eradicated”, but the Marquis of Creil protested that “this is not true”. He thought that disarming the rural populations was equivalent to “ordering them to let their throats be ripped out”!1

The carrying of firearms, which had been strictly regulated since 1516, was a controversial point in the fight against wolves in general, until the French Revolution. Around a forest area like Orléans, the conflict between locals and gamekeepers complicated the situation.2 However, the officers of the Duchy were not immune to certain interests, particularly those of the Orléans bourgeoisie, who were worried about the consequences that the situation might have on their agricultural incomes. The exploitation of the vineyards, where many owned land, was in fact blocked for many months by the attacks.

From July 1696 to March 1699, a second string of attacks struck the same area, right up to the edge of the town of Orléans, because the “beast that reign[ed]” ate two victims on 7 August 1696 in the parish of Saint-Marc outside the city walls. This community was almost entirely vineyards. On 13 September 1697, to stop the attacks by wolves which in the space of two months, “with extraordinary tenacity”, had devoured “over 100 people or six score [120] people and injured even more”. The Duchy’s hunting captain organised collective hunts, and gave the right to carry weapons to the “townspeople of Orléans going to their country homes” as well as to “peasants and those living near the forest” going to work. The fact that wolves disturbed the local economy in this way tells us much about the severity of the problem they caused, at the time of Perrault’s Tales.

The Beast of Touraine (February 1693-September 1695))

Whilst man-eating wolves were still being reported in Hurepoix and in Beauce (Chartres), a new spate of attacks began in early 1693 in Touraine. As in the Yvelines area in 1677, or in Orléanais in 1690, the attacks quickly made their mark. One of the first to be informed, the priest of Continvoir (Indre-et-Loire), gave an initial, precisely situated, report of the victims. In the north-west sector of Touraine, the habitat and cultivated areas were scattered across a landscape of forests, woods, copses, and moors. The two woods in question lay to the north of the Saint-Martin moors, between Benais and Continvoir. Very quickly, the attacks spread to the surrounding villages. The lack of weapons, or their owners’ lack of skill, meant that the problem spread unchecked. On 25 June 1693, Intendant Miromesnil reported on the situation to the General Finance Minister, Phélypeaux de Pontchartrain. He indicated the consequences of the attacks for the economic activity of the province, particularly for livestock farming. From one parish to the next, reports were the same, and were even heard outside of the area. Just outside Anjou, in Varennes-sous-Montsoreau, although the attacks did not extend this far, the priest saw fit to make note of the severity of the tragedies in neighbouring Touraine.

Already, the very specific perception of people at the time is recognisable: faced with the animal’s strange behaviour towards men and its astonishing capacity to survive efforts to eradicate it, doubt and imaginations ran riot. We will cover the true nature of the attackers later on, but for now, it is important to ask how far we should trust these approximate figures. On 9 July 1701, upon burying one of his parishioners who was “killed and partially eaten” by another “beast”, the same priest recalls that “similar [beasts] had appeared in the same locations seven or eight years ago, eating over 250 people.” Parish records indicate that the first spate of attacks that interests us lasted 18 months, from March 1963 to September 1694. A final total of around 250 victims was recorded, which seems like a reasonable figure, including when compared to preceding figures given as the affair went on. The priest of Armenonville certified 190 deaths in 1682, which again is not surprising. In spite of the inevitable gaps in parish registers, due to loss of records and the erasure of many passages (a factor which unavoidably leads us to underestimate the true figures), already, with 135 death records, we have the largest corpus of individual data that the Ancien Régime can provide for deaths due to wolves attacking humans. The geographical translation of this data shows the extent of the scourge.

From the borders of Anjou, crossing over into Courléon in the west, to the edge of Tours, the extent of the problem along the right bank of the Loire was comparable to that seen in Orléanais in the two preceding years. The attacks were concentrated inside a triangular area of around 40km up the side and 24km along the bottom (around 500km²): the area of vineyards and polycultural activity between the wooded areas and the Loire. This “segmented land” was a constant and diverse mix of various crops, woods, moors, meadows, and vineyards, with a highly dispersed habitat, and wooded countryside breaking up the horizon.3 Without giving in to excessive geographical determinism, we cannot help but observe that the context shaped by human intervention created dangerous potential for interactions with wolves. With local variations, the situation resembled that in Yvelines 15 years before. The concentration of the victims within several parishes (19 appear here) brings out similarities: some priests more frequently or even systematically blamed the “wolf” or “wolves”, whereas for others, fear was focused on one or more ferocious beasts, particularly “the” beast.4

In this area of Touraine, wolf attacks on humans were at a high. However, despite this virulence, far less deaths were attributable to wolves than to the terrible outbreak of typhoid which shook the region and a large part of France in 1693-1694. Against a background of chronic malnutrition, famine, and epidemic, there were thousands of deaths in the area.5

1742-1755: The Loire Valley Falls Victim Again

One of the worst affected zones was still the heart of the Loire Valley. From 1742 to 1755, for 14 years, Touraine and Vendômois lived in constant fear of man-eating wolves.

With 136 out of a total 265 recorded incidents, over half of the attacks in our corpus took place in the countryside between Loir and Cher. Nowhere else were the attacks so concentrated. We were able to collect data for deaths due to wolves attacking humans in 54 different parishes. By looking closely at their distribution, it is possible to identify five successive hotbeds of attacks. The first area, affected from July 1742 to September 1745 covers 350km² in the west of Vendômois. Not far away, but on the other side of the Loire, the second area measuring 300km² in southern Touraine, saw slightly staggered attacks from January 1743 to March 1747. The attacks then shifted to the part of Touraine extending into the south-east, spilling over onto the left bank of the Cher, in 1747-1748. However, at the same time, back on the first side of the Loire, there was a fourth area, north of Tours and Blois, which was largest at 750km², with deaths from October 1747 to December 1751. Finally, the last hotbed was in east Vendômois, with the last attacks from September 1751 to November 1755, in the same area already briefly affected in 1730. In referring to the attacker, each of our informers remains faithful to their own terminology: the priest of Monnaie described only wolf attacks in 1747, whilst the priest of Vallières-les-Grandes wrote only of ferocious beasts. In Chaumont-sur-Loire, it was always “the” beast, but elsewhere, as in Souvigny-de-Touraine, opinion seems to have been divided. Setting this vocabulary aside, the effects were the same: “flesh-hungry wolves” or “evil beasts” showed the same appetite for human flesh. For, Neilz de Bréviande, priest of Périgny, the first attacks in Vendômois were the work of a wolf “said to be different from the local wolves” which attacked only animals. A good observer, our priest describes the predator’s technique and its preferred time of attack, according to the stages in the cycle of crops grown in Beauce (Vendôme). He provides much higher victim figures than are seen in the data from available death records alone.

From one hotbed to the next, hunts were called, sometimes successfully killing the attacking wolf, or at least a wolf supposed to have devoured human flesh (with the grisly confirmation of this given by an autopsy). In Orbigny (Indre-et-Loire), the southern extreme of the third hotbed of attacks, on the very day when Jeanne Brunet, a 17-year-old girl “one third eaten by a beast which had seriously injured other people from elsewhere” was buried, a wolf hunt was organised.

« lesdits habitants ayant fait une huée, ont tué un loup et l'ayant éventré ont trouvé en les entrailles de ladite bête en forme de loup, de la chair humaine, ce qui a fait conjecturer que c'était la même bête6. »

However, these noisy hunts, mobilising peasants who sometimes had little motivation and were poorly organised, mainly just drove wolves out, forcing them to go elsewhere. Yet the fight against wolves also met with inherent legal difficulties, related to the application of hunting law under the Ancien Régime (which was fiercely protected by prominent Lords of Justice) and to conflicts of jurisdiction with the wolf-hunting officers of the louveterie: the complexity of administrative borders and overlaps made it easier for wolves to move and get past the nets set up in a few woods, which were often not wide enough. From Summer 1743, in many lordships, the tax collector denounced these “flesh-hungry wolves”, which in “prodigious” numbers were not content with eating livestock in the plains (which was seen as a fact of life), but seemed to “prefer men, women, and children”. Consequently, seigniorial judges such as the bailiff of the Marquisate of Herbault, shocked by the first attacks, ordered wolf hunts every Sunday. This temporary measure became legally blocked by one territorial issue: dozens of rulings from the seigniorial police were required. In 1748, hunts were organized near Tours, Amboise, Chinon, Loches, Baugé, Château-du-Loir, Perseigne and Vendôme, over an even larger area, because wolves were “coming out of the woods and forests quite regularly”.7 Around the Amboise forest, the situation was so severe that the sub-delegate Cullerre asked for a division of the king's wolf-hunters to intervene. Five men with ten dogs arrived at the end of May. Ferrant, the local head of the Water and Forest Administration banned them from hunting, on the pretext that he had not received the order from the overall head who had jurisdiction over the Amboise forest. The sub-delegate had to go to the intendant, who in turn consulted the royal authorities. Louis XV ordered for the overzealous officer to be imprisoned for intervening where he should not, and the conflict did not abate with the arrival of Eynard de Ravanne, awoken from his “lethargy”. The conflict of duties between the two administrations, which occurred all over France, and which was the result of an abusive interpretation of an edict of July 1607, gave wolves which had been flushed out or seen time to move on. It delayed the wolf-hunting officers’ action by several weeks.8 The rival group spirit of competing services of the royal authorities (the forest rangers and the louveterie) inevitably made hunts less effective. The extent of the operations and the wolves’ endurance also limited the impact of the hunts. When the wolf-hunting officers left again on 1 August 1748, having spent the whole of July chasing wolves, the sub-delegate made it clear that results had been mixed.

« L'équipage de louveterie est parti le premier de ce mois ; on n'entend plus parler de désordres dans les cantons. Si l'on n'a pas détruit les loups qui les tourmentaient, il y a apparence qu'on les a éloignés9. »

Beyond just the royal forests (where control was so contentious), there was also conflict about the flat country areas through which wolves had to be followed. On 11 February 1750, with wolves “ceaselessly continuing their attacks” in Dame-Marie-les-Bois, Morand, Autrèche, Fleuray (Indre-et-Loir) and Saint-Étienne-des-Guérets (Loir-et-Cher), the priest of Dame-Marie-les-Bois emphasized that it was first necessary to obtain the consent of the four main lords.

« Il serait à propos de commencer par Saint-Nicolas les battues, sur le territoire de monsieur le comte d'Estain et monsieur le comte de Bury, monsieur le baron de Boye, monsieur le marquis de Villeneuve, seigneur de ma paroisse, à qui appartient tous les bois, à Dame-Marie10. »

With the attacks affecting a total 2 000km2 (and undoubtedly more, because part of the reality remains invisible to us),11 the Loire region, with its forests and woods of various statuses, was favourable terrain for man-eating wolves. This made eradicating them difficult. Matters were no easier under Louis XV than under his predecessor, and the physical safety of the inhabitants could not be guaranteed.

The Loire Valley was not the only area to suffer. The countryside around Lyon experienced a very similar situation for over ten years (1746 to 1756). On an even larger scale than Vendômois and Touraine, the attack hotbeds seemed to move from one area to the next, for variable periods. Four are clearly visible in our sources, forming pairs. On maps, they appear in symmetry on either side of the Lyon intersection.

---

Notes and References

1 Arch. nat. G7 418.

2 Catherine Thion, La forêt d'Orléans, une forêt paysanne. Histoire des relations entre un espace et des communautés riveraines (1671-1789), thèse de doctorat d'histoire, université de Paris IV-Sorbonne, 2004, p. 198-200.

3 Brigitte Maillard, Les campagnes de Touraine au xviiie siècle. Structures agraires et économie rurale, Rennes, pur, 1998, p. 62.

4 Marie-Rose Souty, « La bête de la forêt de Benais », Bulletin des Amis du vieux Chinon, VII, 6, 1972, p. 577-581 ; Jacques Maurice, « Loups en Chinonais », ibid., VII, 10, 1976, p. 1040-1045 ; Emmanuelle Belle, Les Loups en Touraine et dans ses confins au XVIIIe siècle (1693-1776), Mémoire de maîtrise, Université de Tours, 1997, 2 vol., 119 + 116 p. multigr.

5 Marcel Lachiver, Les Années de misère. La famine au temps du grand roi, Paris, Fayard, 1991, p. 155-208 ; François Lebrun, Les hommes et la mort en Anjou aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles. Essai de démographie et de psychologie historiques, Paris, ephe, 1971, p. 340-347.

6 Arch. dép. Indre-et-Loire, C 411, 27 juillet 1748.

7 Jacques Baillon, Nos derniers loups. Les loups autrefois en Orléanais, Orléans, Les Naturalistes orléanais, 1990, rééd. revue et corrigée, 1991, p. 82.

8 François-Ferdinand Villequez, Du droit de destruction des animaux malfaisants ou nuisibles et de la louveterie..., 2e éd., Paris, Larose et Forcel, 1884, p. 214-215 (1er éd. : 1867).

9 Arch. dép. Indre-et-Loire, C 411

10 Arch. dép. Indre-et-Loire, C 412, lettre de Pilon, curé de Dame-Marie-les-Bois, 11 février 1750.

11 Dans la région de Loches, un loup « curieux de chair humaine » attaque plusieurs personnes sur la route de Saint-Quentin-sur-Indrois en 1750 (Jacques Baillon, Nos derniers loups..., 1991, p. 82 d'après J-C Boulay).

Homme et loup : 2000 ans d'histoire - Jean-Marc Moriceau - CRHQ (Centre de Recherche d'Histoire Quantitative) UMR 6583 Mentions légales