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The 18th-century French media stoked a werewolf panic
If you've studied French (or, indeed, been French) in the past couple of decades, you may well have played the card game Les Loups-garous de Thiercelieux.
“In the 1760s, nearly three hundred people were killed in a remote region of south-central France called the Gévaudan (today part of the département of Lozère),” says the Public Domain Review. By the winter of 1764–65, “the attacks in the Gévaudan had created a national fervor, to the point that King Louis XV intervened, offering a reward equal to what most men would have earned in a year.” In September of 1756, a lieutenant named François Antoine “shot the enormous ‘Wolf of Chazes,’ which was stuffed and put on display in Versailles.” This didn’t stop the killings, but “by now the Royal Court had lost interest. Luckily a local nobleman, the Marquis d’Apcher, organized another hunt, and in June 1767 the hunter Jean Chastel laid low the last of what had turned out to be the Beasts of the Gévaudan.”
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