The Beast of Gevaudan • Puppet History
[Music] welcome back one and all to puppet history today we'll be taking an ever whining look at yet another chapter in the heavy heavy book we call history while our guests ruthlessly compete for the coveted title of history master i am obviously your beloved host the professor oh thank you good to be back ryan bergara are you ready i'm as ready as i'll ever be okay and i'm liking my chances this season me too i'm really rooting for you i'm sure you are special guest sarah rubin are you ready i am ready i'm very excited then let's crack in it's season three baby i'm gonna live forever [Music] to begin does anything beat a leisurely solitary walk in the wilderness you guys ever uh just go for an amble i love to amble love to skip a stone across a river oh yeah sometimes i like walking along the beach feeling that ocean breeze well look it's not a contest dude just because sarah said she sees some birds you don't have to be one up and well i wasn't trying to one-up her i was just trying to describe my life he doesn't you know he doesn't uh oh wait what's going on there who's that that's my sweet boy what's wrong professor you don't like cats you know most cats i don't like but i gotta say that is one beautiful animal isn't he perfect he's gorgeous you look like a movie villain now sarah i know i mean between him and our special guests these are two of the most attractive beings we've ever had on this show oh stop this is strange do you two know each other well for physical mental heck even spiritual health there's nothing more invigorating than a stroll through the countryside unless that is you're walking through rural southern france specifically in the middle of the 18th century that would require time travel and is therefore impossible and thank goodness for that because folks there was a monster in them dar woods today we're talking about the notorious beast of javadon are we talking about a real beast are we talking about like amnai shyamalan's the village scenario well there's definitely a village here spoilers for the village if you haven't seen that movie yet congratulations you did a good job have you guys heard of this beast no no i only know two beasts beauty and the beast and beast from x-men sure he's my uh uncle b's from x-men batman yeah big guy what about cookie monster uh he's a second cousin we got some pretty freaky family reunions man just a basket of blueberries blue man group yeah they're all there think about the blue man group we're technically the same species they just shaved from head to toe okay monsters are no monster france wasn't the happiest place in the mid 1760s in 1763 the nation signed the treaty of paris signifying their defeat in the seven years war against the british and the prussians the war left france in financially dire straits and in this post-war slump not many french folks were poorer more isolated or busier farming for their very survival than those in the province of javadon sounds familiar no what those people were going through oh working non-stop to remain alive yeah there's going to be some parallels in this story that's cool i mean because people come to the show for escapism so i like that you went completely in the opposite direction yeah yeah sorry everybody [Music] so sorry the steep rocky terrain made farming particularly difficult livestock especially cows and sheep were critical to their meager french diets and it was typical for women and adolescents to tend to these big dumb animals in the fields i gotta be honest it sounds like a good gig staring at animals all day yeah i would love that just put mascara on cow eyelashes all day give them little kisses you might get fired as a shepherd if you uh have you ever really looked at like a cow's eyelashes i've actually never noticed cows have beautiful eyelashes oh they're stunning good for them why don't you look at the world around you yeah not just at your screen go stare at a cow yeah i'll start looking at cows a little closer in a more sensual way it's not sensual it's not about the sensuality i'd kiss a cow i'd give a cow a big old kiss glad we all agree on that okay june 30th 1764 it was a saturday but for 14 year old jean boulay it was still a work day she was watching her family's sheep in the hills to the east of chevadon alone with only the animals to keep her company suddenly lay was in the presence of some sort of creature a beast if you will well now folks if you know beasts you know they're out here snacking and attacking which is what it did and so jin boulay became a beast buffet now we don't know if she put up much of a fight but in the end she hadn't stood much of a chance anyway when she was found her throat had been torn out by powerful jaws jesus yeah some beast stuff going on here right from the jump normally beasts in the first act of a story are very stealthy almost like they're trying to assess the situation a couple of dead chickens here and exactly yeah you see some footprints something that jumps out to me as a monster aficionado is they went right for the neck and that's like not something like just a regular animal does like does an animal know to just go for the neck it could be also a human you know that's a very human thing like sweeney todd or jack the ripper and humans are monsters so it scans it makes you think of like how often people got away with crimes back then because they could just kill someone and be like a beast the beast has done it a beast uh pooped in the kitchen what the professor are you not potty trained unfortunately for the french peasantry these sorts of things were not entirely unexpected those tending flocks and herds were isolated and vulnerable our first question of the season what made the shepherds of rural france especially vulnerable to attack a it was illegal for them to own guns b they carried raw meat to cook for lunch in the fields or c shepherds used urine from dogs and heat to encourage sheep to mate wow this is really hard actually were there guns in the 1700s yes ryan what have you put i'm gonna go with c pungent piss okay sarah hey no guns for you no guns allowed first history point of the season to sarah thank you professor that's right the law prohibited anyone from owning firearms except the aristocracy meaning those tending flocks had if they were lucky only a staff to protect them your only real hope against a predator was that a bonk on the noodle would send the ravenous bloodthirsty fiend packing not the best form of defense i guess i mean donatello had a staff and he handled himself pretty well not as well as the other dudes though yeah you can't bring a stick to a monster fight i would use this stick to poke out the eyes and then i'd trip it you'd tabletop it over a shepherd yeah as one of the world's leading cryptozoologists that's a hard word to say i don't think i nailed it but i'm not going to do it again i would throw the stick to try to befriend it because i feel like most cryptids are nice that's a better idea in essence no one thought poor jean boule's death anything terribly unusual she was vulnerable and delicious and there were wolves average life expectancy was only 20 to 25 anyways weighed down by high infant mortality rate sad so 14 wasn't too bad plus when you had a badass job like staring at sheep in a field all day you knew you were assuming the risk of being mauled to death unfortunately much of that risk was being assumed by children who started dropping like well frankly they were dropping like defenseless children facing off against wolves on august 8th a 15 year old girl was found dead maimed in a similar fashion as boulet weeks later a 16 year old boy was say it with me between september 1st and 26th four more people were killed what had been an occasional misfortune was bleeding into an everyday tragedy understandably anxiety began to build so we're a couple months in now what are their defensive measures that they're taking to counteract this beast well ryan thank you for asking the government official in javadon etienne lafont started organizing hunts for whatever was snacking on people like rice cakes efforts to establish a permanent patrol of 10 locals fell flat as most citizens were afraid to venture too far out into the wilderness without being led by an experienced hunter the peasants were also too poor and didn't have any pto to spend wandering the woods in search of a bloodthirsty monster and so the attacks continued on october 7th a 20 year old woman was found her head was not that turned up about a week later then in the following days six more teenagers were attacked wait where was the headphone was the head found in the same spot yeah probably somewhere around there you can't say yeah that someone was found and then their head was found a week later and have no further time i was found up the crick is that better they found it up a crick the six teenagers after feels like it's very targeted like someone made fun of the beast in the town yeah the beast feels like rural france's zodiac killer at this point yeah a little bit it's a too theatrical to be a pack of wolves would you guys uh join the hunt yeah i think i would why not i think it would say at this point be safer to be on the hunt than it would be to be in the field yeah with a group of people i'd feel safe yeah because now you got seven sticks instead of one that's right as casualties began to stack up lafont began to get upset with the residents why a they started leaving offerings of slaughtered sheep on lafont's doorstep hoping to draw the beast to his house instead of their fields b they banged pots and pans 24 hours a day to scare the beast away or see they kept doing their jobs so seize nothing they didn't do anything yeah okay mama's ready brian what you got this pandemic has taught me anything about human nature i'm gonna go with c business as usual and sarah they're banging a lot of pots and pans let's find out via the magic of theater [Music] another day another dollar to be earned as a sounding little german another dollar to be island out in the cruel wilderness a thing of the french say you there why you filthy peasants keep going outside i keep getting yelled at because girls like you keep getting thrown apart don't you know you're safer at home we do know that monsieur elephant i would like to stay home but also i enjoy eating yes but there is a health emergency maybe the government could pay for us to stay home until they solve the health crisis that seems like the most responsible and safest thing to do no hmm no okay um then i'm going to go to work then no one should yell at me if you die okay so you don't want responsibility if we die from the menace and you also don't want responsibility for us starving to death in our houses yes good okay i'm glad we have an understanding tiny wolf treat cinematic parallels this one hurts whoa point to ryan congrats bro business as usual in an oddly familiar situation the government was simultaneously mad its citizens continued to provide their bodies as fuel for the menace while making only token efforts to stop them from economic ruin and starvation if they chose to stay safe by november a local newspaper the corriere de vignon had begun publishing reports about the slaughters this was somewhat unusual today if an unknown monster was eating people we'd expect to see that sort of thing covered in our newspapers but back in the mid 18th century the happenings of small towns didn't usually make headlines newspapers relayed war news whatever the kings and queens of europe were up to and not much else with the seven years war now over however there were a lot of empty columns in need of newsprint the editor of the coreya davinyan recognized that a fearsome beast decapitating teenagers might catch readers attention and so he started to sensationalize just a bit whoa what happened when the corya devinyan started writing about the beast a it became one of the first international news stories b hoping to avoid a panic the crown shut down the paper or c beast attacks quadrupled as people went out into the fields hoping to catch a glimpse of the thing that's actually pretty tough these are tough questions i honestly wasn't expecting them to be so hard hey ryan what did you put i regretfully must say c more corpses no okay sarah news all over from top to bottom it's news baby okay point to sarah stories about the beast were soon outright stolen from the corey davignon and republished in the papers of paris england amsterdam prussia germany basically everywhere all of europe wanted to read about these poor french peasants being eviscerated by a ravenous monster with papers to sell to a terrified public the details surrounding the monster began to grow more and more elaborate time for a history point and this one's a little kooky i want each of you to draw this abomination as i describe it the drawing that strikes the most terror into my little blue heart wins you want me to have a draw off against an artist look anyone can draw you know children can this isn't ratatouille all right it's judged on merit here maybe your drawing ryan will be so bad that it will scare the professor oh yeah yeah yeah yeah that's fair according to descriptions of the time it was enormous much larger than a wolf maybe even as big as a young bull it had a chest as wide as a horse's and a body as long as a leopard to top it all off a long muzzle red hair with a black stripe and fiery eyes it sounds like my mother-in-law you know are you married no i'm not i just wanted to make a mother-in-law joke eventually descriptions began to border on the supernatural the creature was bulletproof could walk on its hind legs and snap apart a human skull with a single bite it had a tail like a snake and talons on its paws the yon reported the beast gave a boy a fever simply by looking at him and a broadsheet described how one young girl who survived a run-in with the monster had almost been knocked over by its breath alone which was described as stinking rotten i'll give you a moment here to finish your drawings [Music] okay time to check in on those drawings you each get as many jelly beans as i poop out in fear sarah let's take a look at yours oh she drew that in such a little time let me see here one two three four five six seven eight little jelly bean poops for sarah and ryan let's take a look at yours it's a middle finger you're telling me to go myself now i thought this was a family program this is a family program you get one with the entire continent receiving regular updates about how the french populace were now walking go-gurts for some unkillable creature the government decided it should maybe do something lafont along with infantry captain jean-baptiste duamel organized a military-like hunt for the animal with some actual firepower now on their side thirty thousand men volunteered to help put a stop to the monster's reign of terror for the soldiers hunting this scourge was going to be a way to redeem themselves after the humiliating loss of the seven years war maybe they couldn't defeat britain and prussia but they could definitely take down a wolf or whatever right not so right the hunters failed to stop the beast they set out poisoned bait and resorted to more and more theatrical ways to draw out the monster so which of the following tactics did authorities not use to lure the monster a sending military men out in the fields in drag b dressing lambs up in bonnets and girls clothing and tying them upright in steaks or c putting lipstick and wigs on a bowl so it looked like a sexy lady monster uh ryan what do you got i'm gonna go with b because it sounded painful to string up those sheep and i hope they didn't do that and sarah i'm gonna say the lips and wigs it's just too silly some very sound logic sarah and for that you get a history point because you are correct oh wow yeah they didn't put lipstick on a bowl and dress it up like a lady monster ryan i see okay by february 1765 with lafont and duamel's efforts coming to naught a famed father-son hunting team the denivars made their way to chevadon from normandy having claimed to have already killed twelve hundred wolves father jean charles was confident he and his boy would not fail that's a lot of wolves why they got to kill that many wolves normandy's probably got just an ass load of wolves up there most of like these places weren't developed so the wolves could just you know have their fill this sounds like paradise what i guess if i was a wolf it'd be paradise yes wolf paradise certainly i've said this many times i think it'd be really cool to be like reincarnated as a wolf uh you get to howl at stuff you get to be naked you get to pee on stuff it's fun howling as a group sounds like a lot of fun yeah it does sound fun hey wait a minute should we try it three two one yeah i felt good yeah that was pretty chill actually i enjoyed that anyway they failed and then they gave up by now the crown was really getting embarrassed at every turn king louis xv sent francois antoine his personal gun bearer and bodyguard to deal with the matter once and for all if antoine couldn't kill the monster no one could and it would presumably continue to devastate france for millennia have these people ever heard of like fire fire would be a good thing to use here wolf don't like fire well no one don't like floyd wolf he don't like fire i mean unless this beast does like fire you never know he's an arsonist he's sick antoine tracked through the unforgiving craggy terrain with a group of men and his son and in september of 1765 they finally came upon what turned out to be a large wolf antoine the mighty murderer chopped and killed the beast as well as its massive mate and their cute widow club after more than a year of living in fear the villagers could finally let out a sigh of relief their ordeal was over antoine had the wolf stuffed and sent back to versailles as a prize for the king so how did the royal court react upon seeing the dreaded beast a meh b the queen fainted resulting in a concussion from which she never fully recovered or see the king was so blown away he made antoine head of the armed forces for his ability to murder such a creature alrighty i'm locked in all right ryan what do you got uh hey man that just feels like that's the funniest outcome and sarah i said c have an army all right well let's find out [Applause] oh your highness antoine has done it he has slayed the beast of javadon and sent his body back here for you oh hell yeah can you bring it in oh yeah well just a second oh it's heavy there's a heavy yeah here you go look at the size of that thing there's a big hairy frog what kind of pictured it being more of a monster yeah it's just sort of a wolf isn't it yeah it looks that way okay so that air is just being attacked by wolves right there isn't any actual beast is there yeah probably not sir well we'll just say this problem is now taken care of cool cool give me a kiss okay [Music] i feel like a real goober point to ryan the royal court was pretty disappointed to find that the monster antoine head slain was just an ordinary wolf and one that showed no evidence of having consumed human flesh at that nevertheless the king used the opportunity to wash his hands of the whole situation to him it was clear the area was suffering from your run-of-the-mill wolf infestation but since the beast narrative had already been set by the papers the king went along with the idea that the dead creature before him was responsible the nastiness of javedon was now solved newspapers in paris and elsewhere stopped reporting about wolf attacks and the world moved on lazy ass king it also sounded like it didn't even eat a lot of people it was just like tearing their throats out and being like all right well that thing's not moving anymore it probably just wanted to eat the sheep that's fair he sees the human protecting the sheep he says you gotta go teen girl say goodbye to your future for the poor peasants around chevedon however the attacks continued for another 18 months claiming another 30 to 35 lives holy before eventually petering out in 1767. they killed 30 to 35 more people after they this this wolf was presented it sure did did the king do anything or was he just like no today no one can be certain what exactly was attacking the peasants of the southern french countryside back in the 1760s some claim a sub-adult male lion was responsible as many of the wildest descriptions fit a lion more than a wolf traveling menageries of exotic animals were fashionable in france at the time typical rich french weirdo stuff it's possible a lion escaped and wreaked havoc in the countryside in particular this could help explain why the dang thing was so hard to kill despite at least a dozen claims of hunters having shot it others have suggested the beast was a hyena possibly also from a menagerie some pointed to the creature's particular affinity for young blood to suggest it might even be a werewolf which is dumb as hell today the closest thing to a consensus is the same conclusion reached by louis xv wolves there's a reason so many fairy tales have wolves as the bad guy some historians report that during the early modern period as many as 9 000 people lost their lives due to wolf attacks perhaps some particularly brutal attacks coupled with a newspaper looking to juice up its sails sparked the imaginations of a beleaguered people this wouldn't even have been the first time a spate of wolf attacks was chalked up to a mystery beast in 1634 a furious beast terrorizing the town of evru turned out to be a wolf same with the 1665 beast of gatinee and two separate beasts haunting northern france one in 1743 the other in 1748 both turned out to be wolves as well in essence france was the country who cried monster when the culprit usually turned out to be a wolf i feel like if you're living in the south of france osu de provence oh that's gonna be a little jelly bean for sarah okay like i feel like it's so beautiful there in such a wonderful place to live that if there's a risk that i'll get eaten by a wolf i'll still live there that's fair no matter how out of control the narrative spun we shouldn't forget the real human toll taken during this whole ordeal so how many people were murdered by the beast of javadon ryan i put 846 okay and sarah i put 63 and i put it in a big heart oh what because you loved that they were killed yeah just you know i just like hearts i mean i thought for a second you were gonna be like you know i am i'm a serial killer and uh when people get killed well points to sarah because she is closest by several hundreds uh that's good that's why i wrote that number because i wanted a happy ending now numbers vary many sources blame the beast for 100 murders though the new york times gives the creature credit for as many as 200 fatalities before the attacks finally and mercifully petered out well thus concludes our history lesson i'm going to go tally the scores to see who receives the coveted cup and the title of history master while i do that please enjoy this special performance from the beast of zebedee wow what no abacus necessary for this episode [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] is this guy going on tour that was incredible what a jaw dropping performance now let's see how we did you guys are never going to believe this but this week's history master is sarah rubin go and fetch the coveted cup which you have so rightly earned well ryan as always uh perfect attendance on your part so that's something yeah it is it is something i can't wait to shoot these in person and be within a hugging distance of you oh that's very sweet of you wow sarah oh a pop socket cool oh that's cool i wonder if these are for sale anymore i'm a good guest well sarah thank you so much for being here ryan thank you for trying and thank you all for watching puppet history where the details are always a little fuzzy we'll see you next time paprika dustin dondon a scientist you were generally french heads for a troll with my dummy in my time no thanks i'm good i'll take the chat please
2021-03-14 16:17
