Monsters of the Gévaudan revisits this spellbinding tale and offers the definitive explanation for its mythic status in French folklore. The Making of a Beast.
Table of contents
- Monsters of the Gévaudan
- The Making of a Beast
- Monsters of the Gévaudan: The Making of a Beast - Jay M. Smith - Google Книги
Jay Smith makes a convincing case for the latter. By carefully examining every aspect of the events, he demonstrates how disparate elements came together to create a spectacular case of collective false consciousness.
Monsters of the Gévaudan
The beast, he shows, was something people were drawn to think about, and the trains of thought led through a rich and varied mental landscape. In the end, the crucial factor may have been the media—word of mouth at first, then letters, newspaper articles, and a flood of engravings and broadsheets… Mythology has cohabited with history since the days of ancient Greece, and they still have a lot to learn from each other.
Having once been good for fantasy, it now is good for making history. He forces the beast to say everything it possibly can about the period. He connects a discrete episode with broader historical features of the time, and his originality shines through. To ask other readers questions about Monsters of the Gevaudan , please sign up.
Be the first to ask a question about Monsters of the Gevaudan. Lists with This Book. Sep 12, Chris rated it really liked it Shelves: Smith ties the beast of Gevaudan to French history, showing in particular, how the raise of the news was able to use the Beast. The book is interesting. Sep 06, Joshua Buhs rated it it was ok Shelves: The book started out well, but after a few chapters descended into typical, labored academic writing.
The introduction and first chapter were gracefully written and set the stage nicely. It almost felt like reading one of those grandiose histories from the s, with the firm but polite authorial voice, although focused on a small scale. Smith says that the story of the Beast of Gevaudan is common in French culture. That the deaths occurred is not doubted.
What caused the death, though, is ambiguous, and as the story has waxed and waned in popularity over the centuries, focus has mostly been on what did the killing. Smith wants to tell a different story. He wants to tease out the meaning of the events as they were understood then, and put them in the broader context of changes in French culture. The first chapter does this admirably, arguing that from today's perspective there is no doubt that such events would be made into a national story. But there is a question of why it became popular then.
France at the time suffered about 1, deaths per year to wolves. Praise French micro-history, there's an entire monograph on the subject! So what made these events so special as to attract the attention of newspapers, the king's court, even international news and such luminaries as Horace Walpole and Immanuel Kant? The traditional explanation by the few historians who have looked at the story is, Rural superstition intersected with the rise of mass culture, and an everyday event was blown into a sensation. Smith doubts this explanation, It is true that newspapers carried the story, and often for sensationalistic reasons, but there were other forces operating upon them.
As well, superstition was not limited to the locals.
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Elites, too, were drawn to the story for various reasons. He also dabbles a bit in environmental history to explain exactly why the killer could escape detection so long, and why the poor people of the thinly popularized region continued to her their sheep even as the depredations became worse--with beheadings not uncommon. This tangent would fit into a book that focused more tightly on the story of the attacks themselves, but fits oddly into the book as it eventually unfolds, leaving behind the story itself for great swaths of pages.
The second chapter examines why elites would be interested in this story.
He notes that fascination with wonders was common, for both religious reasons--as omens from God--and secular ones; wonders were central to science, he says, borrowing from Parker and Daston's Wonders and the Order of Nature. Comparing descriptions of the beast to natural historical discussions of different animals, elites suggested a number of possible culprits: The second half of the chapter is where the book starts to go off the rails, losing track of the story.
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Smith spends an inordinate amount of time arguing that religion was not just important to focusing on wonders, but that the beast fit into a particularly intra-Catholic battle of the time. The problem is not this argument--it is good to know! But Smith starts wandering further and further afield. A third chapter brings additional context to explain interest in the beast, but is even more digressive.
Smith argues that the Seven Years War permeated coverage of the killings: This was especially true in the case of Jean-Baptiste Duhamel a military captain, who was appointed to destroy the beast. It was in the course of his failure, Smith argues, that the beast became an extraordinary star--that it became a celebrity in something approaching the modern sense. Before that time, celebrity meant solemnity.
As the beats became a star it came to mean reputation. Only later would it attach to an individual as a celebrity. And Duhamel was one of the sources for its celebrity as an unusual beast. In order to account for his failure, Smith shows, Duhamel exaggerated the beast's abilities, making it more than a mere wolf.
The Making of a Beast
It could hurdle ten foot walls and survive several gun shots. The process continued when a father and son pair of famous wolf hunters were brought in from Normandy. They too failed to capture the beast--and also aggravated the locals with their insolence and indolence. And they too fed newspapers with hyperbolic stories to explain their failures. It may have helped that the general hunts for the beast recruited as many as 20, people!
Monsters of the Gévaudan: The Making of a Beast - Jay M. Smith - Google Книги
Suggesting many were scared of the creature, whatever it was. In came news that some locals had battled the beast, in one case winning, in one case drawing even--though in neither case was the beast killed. These stories fed into a trend of valorizing the rurals, especially against the interlopers from other parts of France. It also fed skepticism about the beast's supernatural traits. Some even began to suspect that there were more than one beast causing the problems, which could account for the creature's amazing ability to cover vast territory even after being shot.
Finally, the following year, another hunter Francois Antoine killed a wolf that was thought to be the beast. And the beast's body was sent to Versailles, where it was proclaimed. When similar killings resumed six months later, the king and his court were no longer interested in sponsoring hunts for a singular beast. The monarchy was already distracted by pre-Revolutionary foment and had invested its credibility in declaring the beast dead, so would not entertain the possibility that it still lived.
Rather, the court argued that the problem was with wolves in general, and recommended large-scale extermination of the predators. In the years immediately following and lasting until the nineteenth century, the story of the beast fell out of favor. It was blamed on superstitious women and children who forced elite men to operate against their better judgment; it was used as a political insult--to suggest silliness. Don't already have an Oxford Academic account? Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford.
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