Werewolves In France!

In sixteenth century France, there were a significant number of reported werewolf attacks, which led to several people being accused of being werewolves, or lycanthropes. These people were tried and most were found guilty. This series of trials are referred to as France’s “Werewolf Trials.” Many historians liken these werewolf trials to the Salem witch trials in the United States in the late seventeenth centry. One such example of a werewolf trial in France was the trial of Gilles Garnier, a hermit who lived in the woods of a French town called Dole. Shortly after he moved to that area, several children went missing and were later found dead and mutilated in the woods.

This prompted the people of Dole to look for a werewolf. Late one evening, a group of workers saw a figure that appeared to be a wolf with a child’s dead body. However, since it was evening, the light was dim and a number of those workers thought that they saw Garnier with the body. Soon after, he was arrested. After fifty witnesses testified against him, he confessed not only to killing the children, but also to being a werewolf, and was burned to death at the stake. In that same time period in France, Pierre Burgo and Michel Verdum were tried and convicted of the murder and mutilation of two young children and a woman.

In yet another case, there was a tailor who was accused and then convicted of using his shop to lure in children. Once the children were in his shop, he would kill and mutilate them, storing their body parts for later use. In some situations, the accused had a mental illness that caused them to commit the crimes, such as with Jean Grenier. At the young age of thirteen, Grenier had an early version of a mental illness called lycanthropy, which involves the delusion that the affected person either is an animal or has the capacity to change in to an animal. He was caught after he murdered and ate fifteen children while under the delusion that he was a werewolf.