Posted on 01/18/2023 2:24:20 PM PST by CheshireTheCat
On this date in 1573, Gilles Garnier was burned at the stake as a lycanthrope. The “Werewolf of Dole” was a scavenging hermit resident on the outskirts of that Burgundian town when a little girl was strangled and partially eaten in October of 1572. Townsfolk feared a maneating wolf but a subsequent pattern of attacks would point at something even more frightful.
As kitsch as it becomes for us in modernity, it is not difficult to discern in the werewolf legend the shadow of a truly terrifying era when predatory wolves and predatory men alike prowled the dangerous byways in Europe, especially France.
And a sure way to conflate the two was through a figure like Garnier (English Wikipedia entry | French), who, in a starving winter, monstrously ate the flesh of his victims. He would later confess — we can only guess through what combination of disordered mind and torturer’s suggestion — that as he foraged one day, wracked by hunger, a phantom appeared to him and offered him an ointment that would confer the lifesaving hunting prowess of the wolf....
(Excerpt) Read more at executedtoday.com ...
Torture was a big thing in those days. The authorities would not believe your confession unless you repeated it under torture. Their sadistic logic was: “You confessed to avoid torture; so we are going to torture you anyhow to see if your confession holds up!”
Loup-garou is a term I haven’t heard since I was in elementary school. Perhaps in a Tarzan movie.
Sacre bleu! Ze loup-garou!
Loup-Garou was bastardised into “Rougaroo” in Louisiana. The swamp monster
In the French-New England wars loup garou was commonly used by both to describe the deep penetration scouts from Quebec. These were ‘habitans’ who might be part Indian . They operated singly or in small cells of 2-3 behind the lines and going far into New England to scout out what was going on very much like contemporary LURPS. Incredibly tough and resourceful and utterly ruthless. Anyone they encountered they killed. They operated year round and there are claims they would cannibalize victims in the depth of winter.Some of this fearsome legend may come from deliberate mangling of victims to try to make it appear a wolf killed the colonist.
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