Jacques Roulet

Jacques Roulet was a beggar from Caude, a village in Anjou in western France, and not from Brittany, as is sometimes repeated. He lived on alms, walking the roads with his brother Jean and his cousin Julien, all three ragged, half naked and reputed to be simple. In a France ravaged by the wars of religion, such men were at once objects of charity and of suspicion: they were given bread and blamed for whatever went missing.

As for the origin of his powers, Roulet pointed to no stranger at a crossroads. He said his own parents had given him the salve years before, and that with it he could turn into a wolf. It is a confession with no devil in it, at least to begin with: a household remedy handed down in the family, which in a courtroom would end up turned into something else.

Roulet described the transformation as a painful process starting with anointing the entire body with the devilish ointment, triggering intense burning followed by gradual body distortion: growth of coarse hair, elongation of limbs into claws, and face morphing into a pointed wolfish muzzle with glowing eyes, lasting hours until becoming a savage wolf prowling forests at night in search of human prey, driven by an irresistible bestial hunger. During this state, he claimed committing horrific crimes like tearing apart innocent children and devouring their raw flesh, especially in rural areas around Angers, where witnesses reported attacks by a mysterious wolf matching his confessions, reflecting collective terror of monsters in an era of plagues and superstitions.

In August 1598 men chasing a wolf through a thicket near Caude came upon Jacques Roulet crouching there, half naked, his clothes in tatters, his hands bloody and shreds of human flesh under his nails. A few paces away lay the torn body of a boy of fifteen. There was no need to look further: they arrested him on the spot.

Before the court at Angers he confessed to everything he was asked. That he rubbed himself with the salve and became a wolf. That he had killed and eaten children. That his brother and his cousin ran with him. When they went to fetch them, Jean and Julien were quietly at home and there was nothing against them but Jacques's word. The court sentenced him to death for witchcraft and lycanthropy.

And then the case turned over. Roulet appealed, and the Parlement of Paris reviewed the sentence and quashed it. The magistrates reasoned that the man was not in his right mind and that his statements had been obtained under duress, so that they proved not a pact but a lost head. They commuted the penalty to two years' confinement in the madhouse of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, with religious instruction. No stake, no lashes, no life sentence: two years and a diagnosis.

Roulet's case is cited again and again because it marks a turning point. It is one of the first in which a higher French court refuses to read a confession of lycanthropy as proof of witchcraft and chooses to read it as a symptom. That way of looking would make headway through the seventeenth century until it put an end to werewolf trials in France, and the Paris ruling of 1598 stands among its most quoted antecedents.

One error that circulates with this case is worth flagging: attributing the account to a 'Discours et histoires des spectres' by one Pierre de Rostegny. The book exists, it dates from 1605, but its author is Pierre Le Loyer; 'Rostegny' corresponds to nobody and looks like a confusion with Pierre de Rosteguy de Lancre, the magistrate who did write about French lycanthropes. With figures of whom barely a few court folios survive, slips of that kind are copied from one book to the next until they end up passing for fact.