Loup-garou

Also Known As: also leu-garou; varou, warou, guérou and djerou in Normandy and the Channel Islands; garwaf, garval and garoul in Old French; from *loup*, “wolf”, plus *garou*, from Frankish *werwolf*, “man-wolf”
Region/Culture: Western Europe
Mythos: French Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Shapeshifters
Mythical Attributes: He takes the shape of a wolf by night, keeps something human behind the animal’s appetite, and carries any wound he takes back into his own body by morning.
Role in Mythos: He is the neighbour who is also the danger, the answer a French village reached for when livestock and children went missing and the tracks led back toward the parish.
Relation to Humans: The loup-garou preys on the people he lives among, and in most tellings he did not choose it, because the shape arrives as a punishment or a bargain and returns night after night until someone breaks the cycle. French courts treated him as a real defendant for well over a century, and the men they put on trial were a hermit, a beggar and a shepherd boy.

In the Cotentin they had a phrase for a man who came home at first light with his clothes destroyed. *Crotté comme un warou*, muddy as a werewolf. It was not a compliment and it was not entirely a joke. The French werewolf did not glide through the dark or stalk anything with dignity. He ran, and he ran badly, through ditches and brambles and ploughed ground, and what gave him away was not fangs but filth.

The name itself is a small accident that never got corrected. *Loup* is the French word for wolf. *Garou* came into French from Frankish, from a word built out of *wer*, meaning man, and *wolf*, meaning exactly what it looks like. So the compound says wolf, then says man-wolf, and the creature has been carrying the redundancy for a thousand years without complaint. Normandy shortened it to *varou* or *warou*; Alençon said *guérou*; around Hauteville they said *djerou*. A man out roving all night was said to be *en varouage*, and the glossaries that collected these words in the 1840s and 1880s note without much comment that people also used *varou* to mean a lout, a dirty goblin, or simply someone impossible to live with.

He is in French writing by the late twelfth century. Marie de France opens her lai *Bisclavret* by saying that in the old days men turned into *garwalves*, kept house in the forests and ate people, and then she sets her own hero apart from them. Bisclavret is the Breton name, she says; the Normans call him Garwaf. Her Bisclavret is a Breton baron who vanishes three days a week and will not say where he goes. His wife wheedles it out of him: he strips in the woods, hides his clothing under a hollow stone, and if the clothes are lost he stays a wolf for good. She tells her lover, the clothes go missing, and the baron does not come back. A year later the king’s hunt corners a wolf that will not fight. It runs to the king’s stirrup, takes hold of it and kisses his foot like a man begging, and the king takes it home. The beast behaves perfectly at court until the wife comes near, at which point it tears off her nose.

Gervase of Tilbury, writing for the Holy Roman Emperor around 1215, was blunter and more practical about the mechanics. In Gaul, he wrote, they call such men *gerulfi*; in England, werewolves. He knew of one, Chaucevaire, who would break off from his friends when the time came, lay his clothes under a bush or a hidden rock, and roll naked in the sand until he had taken the shape and the hunger of a wolf. The detail everyone gets wrong is the timing. Chaucevaire changed at the new moon, not the full one. The full moon is a later arrival and owes more to the cinema than to anything a medieval clerk wrote down.

Almost no French source describes what he actually looks like. He has the shape of a wolf, and that is very nearly all anyone commits to. What the sources give instead is the wreckage: the mud, the scratches, the terrible hunger, the proverbs that measure a man against him. *Built like a varou*. *Eats and drinks like a varou*. In the Norman version he is doing penance for something, and at nightfall he feels an unbearable weight settle on his shoulders and is driven out to run through fields and thickets until he is scraped raw and can barely breathe. He is said to be *carrying* the varou, and the Hague glossary of 1886 preserves the compliment paid to an exhausted man: worn out as if he had been carrying the varou all night. On the nights of *varouage*, a sensible household stayed indoors.

How a man got that way depended on who was telling it. In the folk material the cause is usually a fault to be expiated, or the devil’s own punishment, and the only release is for someone to wound him and draw blood. In the courts the cause was a pact, and the courts got involved in a serious way from the 1520s onward, with eastern France taking the bulk of it: Franche-Comté, Burgundy and the Jura. Gilles Garnier, a hermit living rough in the woods of Chastenoy, was caught in 1573 and the Parlement of Dole did something it almost never did, authorising any inhabitant of the district to hunt the werewolf down on sight. He burned at Dole on 18 January 1574. Henri Boguet, grand judge at Saint-Claude, sat and watched the Gandillon family in their cell going about on all fours and howling, and wrote the whole business up in his *Discours des sorciers*. Jacques Roulet, a vagabond taken near Angers in 1598 beside the remains of a boy, was condemned to death and then rescued by the Parlement of Paris, which decided he was mad and shut him away instead.

The most telling case is the smallest. In 1603 a shepherd boy of about thirteen named Jean Grenier, from Saint-Antoine-de-Pizon, told the court that a man in black he called the Lord of the Forest had given him a wolfskin and an ointment and told him to kill children. A girl his own age, Marguerite Poirier, testified against him. The Bordeaux parlement did not burn him. It put him in a monastery for the rest of his life, on the grounds that the wolf was in his head rather than in the woods. Pierre de Lancre went to see him there before he died around 1610 and printed the interview in his *Tableau de l’inconstance des mauvais anges et démons*. The men France tried for this were a hermit, a beggar and a shepherd boy.

As the wolves themselves retreated from the French countryside, the belief softened rather than died. By the nineteenth century the frightening figure in Berry and the Brenne was no longer the man who became a wolf but the *meneur de loups*, the man who merely led them. George Sand collected these stories for her *Légendes rustiques* in 1858, including one about a fellow called Julien and a bagpipe that charmed the pack. The transformation had quietly dropped out. What survived was the idea of a neighbour with an understanding with the animals.

His powers follow from the shape and nothing more. He has a wolf’s speed, a wolf’s jaw and an appetite that the proverbs treat as his defining feature, and he covers an enormous amount of ground in a night. He hunts the parish he belongs to, which makes him far more dangerous than any wolf, because he knows which byres are unlatched and which children walk home late. He passes among real wolves without alarming them.

His limits are just as concrete. He is bound to the dark and to the night’s end, and the change is not his to command in most tellings. His clothes are the hinge on which everything turns, and a man who loses them loses the way back. Any injury the wolf takes waits for him in his human body, which is why the courts examined hands and faces before they examined consciences. Blood, in the Norman version, is the release: wound him and he is free, and the debt is considered paid. Most of all, he is exhausted. He wakes filthy, torn and ruined, having gained nothing he could keep.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a loup-garou?

A loup-garou is the French werewolf, a man who takes the form of a wolf at night and returns to human shape by morning. The name combines *loup*, French for wolf, with *garou*, a much older Frankish word that already meant man-wolf. French folk tradition treats the condition as a punishment or a pact rather than an infection.

How do you recognise a loup-garou?

By the damage. Any wound the wolf receives at night stays on the man’s body in daylight, so wounds and scratches were treated as evidence in French werewolf trials. Norman sayings also describe the loup-garou as filthy, exhausted and caked in mud from running through fields and brambles all night.

Does the loup-garou transform under a full moon?

Not in the older French sources. Gervase of Tilbury, writing around 1215, describes a werewolf named Chaucevaire who changed at the new moon, and Marie de France gives no lunar trigger at all in her twelfth-century lai *Bisclavret*. The full-moon rule is a much later addition.

How can a loup-garou be freed?

In Norman tradition someone must wound him and draw his blood, which ends the curse. In Marie de France’s *Bisclavret* the key is clothing instead: the werewolf hides his clothes before changing and cannot become a man again unless he recovers them.

Were people actually tried as loup-garous in France?

Yes. French werewolf trials ran from the 1520s onward and clustered in Franche-Comté, Burgundy and the Jura. Gilles Garnier was burned at Dole in January 1574, and in 1603 the Bordeaux parlement sent the thirteen-year-old Jean Grenier to a monastery for life rather than to the stake, treating his wolf as a delusion.