In January 1574 the Parlement of Dole, the sovereign court of the County of Burgundy (Franche-Comté), sentenced a man named Gilles Garnier to be burned alive. He was convicted by the Parlement of Dole of killing children (and treated as a werewolf), and burned at the stake on 18 January 1574; the conviction rested largely on his own repeated confession, and the surviving record does not say whether he was tortured. The court's sentence says he had attacked four children near Dole in the late summer and autumn of 1573 and had killed three of them. It also says he did so, three times out of four, "in the form of a loup-garou," a werewolf.
That last phrase is the reason the case is remembered. It was printed within months, cited by the leading demonologists of the next generation as proof that people could turn into wolves, and reused by 19th-century writers as proof of the opposite: that the judges had burned a madman, or a scapegoat. The story has three layers: what the surviving record says, what later writers repeated and added, and what modern historians and archaeologists have concluded. Belief in werewolves was a belief of the time, and the charge of being a werewolf was a charge, not a fact.
What survives in print is not a trial dossier but the court's final sentence, published in 1574 at Sens, in Champagne, by the printer Jean Savine. Its title, in the spelling of the time, is Arrest memorable de la Cour de parlement de Dole, du dixhuictiesme iour de Ianuier, 1573, contre Gilles Garnier, Lyonnois, pour auoir en forme de loup-garou deuoré plusieurs enfans, et commis autres crimes. That translates roughly as "Memorable sentence of the Court of Parlement of Dole, of the eighteenth day of January, against Gilles Garnier of Lyon, for having devoured several children in the form of a werewolf and committed other crimes." The title adds that the pamphlet was "enriched with some points gathered from various authors to clarify the matter of such a transformation." The text is headed as an extract from the registers of the court's clerk.
The pamphlet's editor was Daniel d'Auge, a scholar from Villeneuve-l'Archevêque in the diocese of Sens who was named royal professor of Greek at Paris in 1574, according to Pierre Bayle. He attached a letter to the dean of the church of Sens. Jean Bodin later wrote in his Démonomanie the sentence had also been printed at Orléans by Éloy Gibier and at Paris by Pierre des Hayes. The full text was reprinted in Paris in 1836 by Louis Cimber and Félix Danjou in their collection of rare historical pieces, from a copy in the royal library, and the physician Louis-Florentin Calmeil published a second transcription in 1845.
Franche-Comté was then a possession of the Spanish Habsburgs, and the sentence names the prosecutor as Henry Camus, doctor of laws, councillor of "the King our Lord" in the sovereign court at Dole and his procureur général there. He brought the case as plaintiff "in a matter of homicide committed on the persons of several children, devouring of their flesh under the form of a loup-garou, and other crimes and offenses." The defendant is described as "Gilles Garnier, native of Lyon, held prisoner in the conciergerie of this place," meaning the court's prison at Dole.
The sentence sets out four counts. It names none of the children, and it lists the attacks in its own order, not the order of the dates.
The first count says that shortly after the feast of St. Michael (September 29) "last," Garnier, being "in the form of a loup-garou," seized a girl of about 10 or 12 in a vineyard near the wood of La Serre, at a spot called "es Gorges" in the vineyards of Chastenoy, a quarter of a league from Dole. He killed her there with his hands, which the sentence describes as "like paws," and with his teeth, then dragged her toward the wood. The sentence alleged that he ate flesh from her body and took some to his wife, Apolline, at the hermitage of Saint-Bonnot near Amange, where the couple lived.
The second count says that eight days after the feast of All Saints (November 1), again "in the form of a wolf," he seized another girl near the meadow of La Ruppe, in the territory of Authume, between Authume and Chastenoy, a little before noon. He strangled her and inflicted five wounds, intending to eat her, but three people came to her rescue. The sentence adds that he had acknowledged and confessed this "many times." It does not say whether this girl lived or died.
The third count says that about fifteen days after All Saints, "in the form of a wolf," he seized a boy of about 10 in a vineyard of Gredisans, about a league from Dole between Gredisans and Menotey, and strangled and killed him; the sentence alleged eating flesh.
The fourth count says that on the Friday before the feast of St. Bartholomew (August 24) "last," he seized a boy of 12 or 13 who was under a large pear tree near the wood of the village of Perrouse, toward Cromary, carried him into the wood and strangled him "like the other children," intending to eat him. People came to help soon afterward, the sentence says, "but the child was already dead." On this occasion, it adds, Garnier was "in the form of a man and not of a wolf," and he would have eaten the boy's flesh if help had not come, "notwithstanding that it was a Friday," a day on which the Church forbade eating meat. The sentence again notes that he confessed this repeatedly.
Read by date rather than by count, the sentence describes a killing in late August 1573, a killing shortly after September 29, an attack around November 8 and a killing around November 15, all in 1573. Each count calls its feast day "last," which places all four in the year before the sentence.
The second surviving document is an order of the same court. Calmeil printed its text in 1845 from a copy supplied to him by Ernest de Fréville. It records that the court had been told that in the territories of Espagny, Salvange, Courchapon and neighboring villages a "loup-garou, as they say," had often been seen for some days, that it had already seized and carried off some small children who had not been seen since, and that it had tried to attack some horsemen in the fields, who had fought it off with difficulty. The court, "desiring to prevent greater harm," permitted the inhabitants of those places and others to assemble, notwithstanding the edicts on hunting, with spears, halberds, pikes, arquebuses and sticks, to chase the werewolf wherever they could find it, and to take, tie and kill it without penalty. The order is dated in the court's council on September 13, 1573.
Calmeil added a caution. Fréville believed the order was probably issued on December 3, not September 13, because the dates of the first killings in Garnier's sentence fit better with a later date, and it was certain, Calmeil wrote, that the Parlement had issued a regulation on hunting werewolves on December 3, 1573, recorded in the Droz collection on Franche-Comté in the royal library. The order does not name Garnier, and nothing in the record links the two documents directly. Calmeil thought it likely that the creature described in the order "was none other than Gilles Garnier."
The sentence names no witnesses. The only other people it mentions are the three who rescued the second girl and the people who came after the boy at Perrouse had been killed. It does not say whether any of them identified Garnier. Bodin wrote that the confession was well verified as to places, times and manner by people present at what he had done. The earliest known printing of the claim that some fifty witnesses testified is in an American law magazine in 1903, which gave no source for it.
The sentence states the basis of the conviction in one line: the court had seen "the criminal trial of the said procureur général, and also the answers and confessions repeated and spontaneously made by the said defendant." On that basis the court sentenced him to be "this day" led and dragged backward on a hurdle by the master executioner of high justice from the conciergerie to the mound ("tertre") of the town, and there burned alive, his body reduced to ashes. He was also ordered to pay the costs of justice.
D'Auge's letter to the dean of Sens adds what he presented as the content of Garnier's last confession. Garnier, "lycophile, as I shall call him," had been a hermit and afterward took a wife; unable to support his family, he fell into despair, and while wandering in the woods he was met by a phantom in the shape of a man who promised him great things, including how to become a wolf, a lion or a leopard at will. He chose the wolf, d'Auge wrote, because it was the more familiar animal in that country, and he made the change with an ointment he rubbed on himself, "as he has since confessed before dying, with acknowledgment of his sins."
The sentence does not say that the court found him guilty of witchcraft or of a pact with the Devil; those words come from d'Auge's letter and from later retellings. The crimes it lists are homicides and the eating of flesh, and the "form of a wolf" is a circumstance it attaches to them.
The printed text gives two years. Its opening line places the case in "the year one thousand five hundred seventy-four," but its closing line says it was "given and pronounced judicially at Dole, in the said court, the eighteenth day of the month of January, the year one thousand five hundred seventy-three." Bodin gave the date as January 18, 1574, as did an 18th-century summary that worked from a printed copy. Because the sentence describes the autumn of 1573 as "last," January 1574 is the date consistent with its own contents.
The sentence ordered that it be carried out the same day. Jules Garinet, who summarized it in 1818, wrote that immediately after it was given, Jacques Janter, sworn clerk of the court's registry, read it to the condemned man in the presence of two councillors, Claude Bellin and Claude Musy, and that it was carried out that day. An 18th-century summary in the Mélanges tirés d'une grande bibliothèque instead says the printed text shows it was pronounced to the prisoner and carried out the next day. D'Auge, according to the same summary, said that an archdeacon and a learned man had witnessed the execution, and that they told him Garnier was of a fairly good family, the son of a lady of the region by her first marriage.
The record does not say that Garnier was tortured. The sentence calls his confessions "repeated and spontaneously made," and Bodin, who wanted the case as evidence, wrote that he confessed "without force or constraint."
Those words have to be read against the procedure of the time. Henri Boguet, a native of Dole who served as chief judge of the land of Saint-Claude in the same province and tried witchcraft cases there a generation later, published an instruction for judges in such cases. He wrote that if an accused person confessed under torture, the confession should be repeated some time afterward, for example 24 hours later, in a place other than the torture chamber, and he described how a confession ratified outside torture could then be relied upon. He also advised judges to avoid torture where they could, not out of doubt about it but because, he believed, witches had remedies against pain. Under such rules a confession first made under torture was meant to be repeated later outside the torture chamber, so a record describing confessions as repeated does not by itself show that no torture was used. The surviving sentence therefore cannot show whether Garnier was tortured or not. The story that he was "put to the rack" first surfaces, so far as is known, in a 1903 magazine article that cites nothing for it.
The sentence does not name a single child, and none of the surviving accounts gives their names, their parents or their villages of origin. What can be said of them is what the court recorded: a girl of 10 or 12 working or walking in a vineyard at Chastenoy in early autumn; a girl attacked in a meadow at Authume a little before midday, saved by three passers-by; a boy of about 10 in the vineyards of Gredisans in November; and a boy of 12 or 13 under a pear tree at Perrouse in late August. They were country children, in the fields and vineyards around Dole at harvest time, and their deaths were serious enough for the Parlement itself to take up the case. Any fuller description of them in later books is not drawn from the record.
The case entered the European debate on witchcraft almost at once. Jean Bodin, the French jurist and political theorist, summarized the sentence in De la démonomanie des sorciers, first published in 1580, as evidence that "witches" could take the form of wolves. His summary is close to the printed text but not identical: he moved the second attack to "a month after" the first, and in his refutation of the physician Johann Weyer he restated the case as a confession to eating "two girls and a young boy." He argued that the details of the confession had been confirmed by others, and that this showed either a real change of body or a human spirit passing into a wolf's body.
Henri Boguet, the judge of Saint-Claude, recorded the case briefly in his Discours des sorciers (Lyon, 1602; second edition 1608), in a chapter on werewolves in Franche-Comté. He placed it after the Poligny trial of 1521 and wrote that in 1573 Gilles Garnier, having likewise confessed that he had made himself a wolf and in that form had killed and eaten several children, was burned alive at Dole by sentence of the court.
Not every learned reader agreed. The bibliographer La Croix du Maine, as reported in the 18th-century Mélanges, recorded that Mathurin Héret, a doctor of the Paris faculty of medicine who taught at Le Mans and had translated the principal Greek authors, wrote "a large book" expressly to criticize the Dole sentence. Pierre Bayle (1647-1706), in the article on Daniel d'Auge in his Dictionnaire historique et critique, singled out d'Auge's discourse on the werewolf sentence as the most curious of his works, and quoted Bodin's summary of the case.
By the late 18th century the case had become an example of judicial ignorance. The Mélanges tirés d'une grande bibliothèque, a French literary compilation of about 1780, said the reader would see "an unfortunate man become the victim of the gross ignorance of his century and his country." The writer described d'Auge's commentary, which claimed to prove that nothing was more certain than the existence of werewolves and that one became one by a pact with the Devil and an ointment, citing Homer, Virgil, Ovid, Pliny, Augustine and Aquinas.
In 1836 Cimber and Danjou printed the full text of the sentence, and an English reviewer in The Athenaeum that October retold it with skepticism, drawing attention, with an exclamation mark, to the court's point that the last offense was committed on a Friday. The reviewer suggested, wrongly on the evidence of the text, that Garnier had been "in priest's orders," and proposed that the case was really a prosecution of a heretic under cover of a pact with the Devil. Nothing in the sentence supports that theory.
The French physician Calmeil, in his 1845 history of madness, headed the case "A man in the grip of the delirium of lycanthropy kills four children and eats human flesh." He accepted that Garnier had killed several children, saying the sentence left little room for doubt, but argued that the laws of the time required courts to spare the blood of the insane, and that a man who believed himself changed into a wolf could not be held master of his acts. He is the earliest known writer to raise the number of deaths from three to four.
Sabine Baring-Gould's The Book of Were-Wolves (London, 1865) gave the case its best-known English form. He took the text of the hunting order from Calmeil, translated the four counts, and added much that is in neither document. He described Garnier's hut, roofed with turf, his stooping walk, pale face, deep-set eyes, eyebrows meeting across the forehead and long gray beard. He wrote that on November 8 peasants of Chastenoy returning from work through the forest found a girl fighting off a creature, some saying it was a wolf and others that they recognized the hermit, and that on November 14 a boy of 10 went missing near the gates of Dole, after which the hermit was seized. He said the evidence was "extracted from him and his wife" and "substantiated in many particulars by witnesses." None of these details appears in the printed sentence or in d'Auge's letter as reprinted, and Baring-Gould gave no source for them. He ended by calling Garnier a "poor maniac" who believed he had actually turned into a wolf.
Regional writers in Franche-Comté added a different set of details. Charles Thuriet's Traditions populaires du Jura (1877), drawing on the local historian Aristide Dey, said Garnier became a hermit at the chapel of Saint-Bonnet near Amange to devote himself to piety, then took a lawful wife, and that "numerous children" were born and poverty came with them. He described the arrest as the moment when people running to the cries at Perrouse found that this time the attacker was a man, Garnier, who "had forgotten his wolf skin," and he dated the wolf scare to 1571. The French writer J. Français, in L'Église et la sorcellerie (1910), repeated this version, adding that Garnier was found beside the boy's body. The sentence says only that people came after the boy was dead and that Garnier was then in human form. It does not describe an arrest.
In February 1903 the American legal magazine The Green Bag published "The Trial of Gilles Garnier" by Joseph M. Sullivan. It called the case an example of "ignorance, superstition, and cruelty unparalleled in the history of jurisprudence," said the confession was "wrung from him while he was suffering from the tortures of the rack," that "fifty persons were found to bear witness," and that the second girl died of her injuries. It quoted, as the court's sentence, a text in which Garnier was found guilty, "by the testimony of credible witnesses and by his own spontaneous confession," of "the abominable crimes of lycanthropy and witchcraft," to be taken in a cart to the stake and his ashes scattered to the winds. That text does not match the 1574 sentence as reprinted in 1836 and 1845, which mentions no witnesses, no witchcraft, no cart and no scattering of ashes. Sullivan cited no source. Several of the details that circulate today about the case, among them the rack, the fifty witnesses and the conviction for "witchcraft," make their earliest known appearance in Sullivan's piece.
Garnier's case was one of a cluster of werewolf trials in the County of Burgundy. Boguet himself placed it beside the burning of three men at Poligny in 1521 for the same charge. The historian Caroline Oates devoted an essay to this cluster, "Metamorphosis and Lycanthropy in Franche-Comté, 1521-1643," published in 1989 in the Zone series Fragments for a History of the Human Body, and the literary scholar Nicole Jacques-Lefèvre studied how demonological writers such as Bodin and Boguet used werewolf cases in "Such an Impure, Cruel, and Savage Beast," published in 2002 in Werewolves, Witches, and Wandering Spirits, edited by Kathryn A. Edwards.
Philippe Nieto, in a 2019 essay on werewolves before the courts in the 16th and 17th centuries, describes werewolf trials as a special kind of witchcraft trial, and notes that physicians since antiquity had tended to explain lycanthropy as a disorder of the humors and a form of melancholy. From a criminological point of view, he distinguishes several situations: witchcraft trials shaped by a parallel rise in attacks by predatory wolves, cases of clinical lycanthropy, and homicides that would now be attributed to a disorganized repeat offender. An "inhuman" crime, he argues, called for an "inhuman" criminal, half man and half beast.
The most direct modern work on Garnier is archaeological. In 2009 Luc Jaccottey and Brigitte Rochelandet published a short study in the French archaeology journal Archéopages of what they identified as the hermitage of Saint-Bonnot at Amange. Working from the written sources and from the research of the historian François Bavoux, they located a building in the heart of the forest of the Serre massif, the same forest named in the first count of the sentence. Its architecture and modest finds dated it to the second half of the 16th century, consistent with the idea that Garnier and his family had lived there.
Their summary places the case in a longer shift: the werewolf, regarded in the Middle Ages as the victim of a curse, became by the 15th century a creature of Satan, hunted like witches. They suggest Garnier was quickly suspected, "certainly" because of his unusual way of life, a hermit with a wife and children, and his origin in Lyon. They note that the details of his confession, the meeting with the Devil who gave him the power to turn into a wolf to feed his family, are similar to those of other trials of the kind. Searches at the hermitage, they write, never found human bones, and they conclude that "sadistic killer or scapegoat," Garnier was harshly condemned in order to calm public anger. Their summary also gives the year of his execution as 1573 in one place and 1574 in its title, a sign of how the sentence's double dating still causes confusion.
Garnier's case is sometimes confused with that of Jean Grenier, a teenager tried for lycanthropy at Bordeaux in 1603. The historian Jan Machielsen reconstructed that separate trial in a 2019 article in the journal Folklore. The two cases are unrelated beyond the charge.
Proven as a matter of record: that the Parlement of Dole convicted Gilles Garnier in January 1574, on the prosecution of Henry Camus, of killing three children and attacking a fourth in 1573, and sentenced him to be burned alive at Dole; that the sentence rested on his "repeated" confessions; and that the sentence was printed at Sens in 1574 with a commentary by Daniel d'Auge.
Stated by the sentence, but resting on his confession: the details of each attack, including the alleged eating of flesh, and his wife's alleged receipt of it. No finding against Apolline, and no trial of her, is on record; her fate is unknown.
The court's belief, not a fact: that he acted "in the form of a wolf." No person can turn into a wolf. The sentence's own account of the last killing has him in human form.
Not in the record: the names of the children; the date and circumstances of his arrest; any witness testimony; any statement that he was tortured; any conviction for "witchcraft" as such.
Disputed: whether the second girl died (the sentence does not say; later writers say she did); whether the hunting order was issued on September 13 or December 3, 1573, and whether it concerned Garnier at all; whether the execution took place on the day of the sentence or the next day; and whether the man really killed the children, or was, in the words of the 2009 archaeologists, a scapegoat. The 1574 record cannot settle that question, because nearly everything in it came from the accused himself.
Added by later writers without a source in the record: his appearance, the peasants' sighting of November 8, the missing boy of November 14, the "fifty witnesses," the rack, the cart, the scattered ashes, his "priest's orders," and his "forgotten wolf skin."
Before 1573: Gilles Garnier, said to be from Lyon, lives as a hermit with his wife, Apolline, at Saint-Bonnot near Amange, outside Dole.
Late August 1573 (Friday before St. Bartholomew's Day): a boy of 12 or 13 is killed near the wood of Perrouse, toward Cromary (fourth count).
September 13, 1573: date of the Parlement of Dole's order allowing villagers of Espagny, Salvange, Courchapon and nearby to hunt a "loup-garou" (possibly December 3).
Shortly after September 29, 1573: a girl of about 10 or 12 is killed in the Chastenoy vineyards near the wood of La Serre (first count).
About November 8, 1573: a girl is attacked near the meadow of La Ruppe, Authume, and rescued by three people (second count).
About November 15, 1573: a boy of about 10 is killed in the vineyards of Gredisans (third count).
December 3, 1573: the Parlement issues a regulation on hunting werewolves (per Calmeil).
By January 1574: Garnier is held in the conciergerie at Dole and confesses repeatedly.
January 18, 1574: the Parlement sentences him to be burned alive; the printed sentence is dated "1573" at its foot.
January 18 (or 19), 1574: Garnier is burned at Dole.
1574: the sentence is printed at Sens by Jean Savine with Daniel d'Auge's commentary; other printings appear at Orléans and Paris.
1580: Jean Bodin cites the case in De la démonomanie des sorciers.
1602: Henri Boguet records it in his Discours des sorciers.
1836: Cimber and Danjou reprint the full sentence; The Athenaeum reviews it.
1845: Calmeil prints the sentence and the hunting order and argues Garnier was insane.
1865: Sabine Baring-Gould's The Book of Were-Wolves gives the best-known English retelling.
1903: The Green Bag publishes a version with the rack and "fifty witnesses."
2009: Jaccottey and Rochelandet publish their study of the hermitage at Amange.