It takes a brave and experienced hunter to again track down “the beast of the Gévaudan,” shorthand for an unusual series of wolf attacks in this centrally situated and deeply isolated French province that between 1764 and 1767 captured the French and European imagination, and have lived on in folklore, novels, film, and a recent resurgence of historical monographs. Jay M. Smith, an eminent historian of the nobility in Ancien Regime France, with its privilege and expertise of the hunt, is more than up to the task. This excellent book provides two fundamental contributions across the disciplines. First, it introduces the events and their extraordinary resonance in France to an English-reading audience for the first time. Smith offers fine-grained readings of the often gruesome and unusual attacks on the women and children of the Gévaudan region, and the responses by local authorities, lords, and Louis XV himself. But Smith does an even greater service in taking as his historical target not the identity of the “beast” itself—wolf, hyena, prehistoric monster?—but rather the cultural and political contexts and the “mental environment” that made the events and the animal possible.

Eschewing interpretations that point to the “superstitions” of an ignorant and primitive peasantry, Smith convincingly demonstrates that “elites” were at the center of the making of the beast—and specifically, its monstrous qualities—and this at a critical, transformative moment in French society. Smith keenly locates the panic, fascination, and search for a heroic solution in the years following France's ignominious defeat and loss of empire in the Seven Year's War (1757–1763). The defeat fueled interest in the beast among the local aristocracy, seeking honor in its traditional role as hunters; in the burgeoning international news market, where journalists filled pages left empty by the end of the war with fabulous narratives of the events in the Gévaudan; and at the court itself, where Louis XV made the capture of the beast a high priority.

In the central chapters of the book, Smith offers a cultural and at times psychological explanation of the interest; elsewhere, notably in its illuminating first chapter on the place of the “monster” in the natural science of the Enlightenment, Smith makes a signal contribution not only to studies of the beast but more generally to a cultural history of science. He is elsewhere attentive to the religious contexts (who would have thought to link, for example, the miraculous interpretation of the beast by the Bishop of Mende to the raging quarrels between Jansenists and Jesuits?), and most especially to the political one (Louis XV as the hunter-king who failed). The book does a fine job teasing out the emergent notion of “publicity” that was to shape the decline of the absolute monarchy, and the French Revolution itself.

Rural historians might be disappointed that Smith chose not to dig deeper into inherited cultural practices in his haste to dismiss local “superstition” as a motive force in the events. And the author might have done even more to explain the consequences of the abrupt arrival of “skepticism” beginning in the summer of 1765, during which the king and elites “normalized” the wolf attacks, and elite interest began to wane. But this informative and well-told history will be read with great interest by scholars working on media markets, animals, social elites, scientific thought, religious history, and the public sphere in France and elsewhere.