It seems that in the countryside of Comminges, south of Toulouse, turbulent children have long been threatened with calling on Blaise Ferrage. But what did this son of honorable peasants from Couserans do to become the local croquemitaine, the legendary “Ogre du Comminges”, the one that a century later, the newspaper Gallic still called “Jacques the Ripper” while drawing the parallel with the London serial killer of the moment?

There is in this character of nightmare a good deal of raw truth but also of popular beliefs, of “fake news before the hour”, warns Jean-Pierre Allinne, author of The Anthropophagus of the Pyrenees*, in 2005.

By exhuming the file of the Ferrage trial from the archives of Foix, this academic, professor of the history of law and institutions, distinguished between myth and reality. What he is convinced of is that Blaise Ferrage, this man described as short, hairy and athletic, born in 1755 in Cescau – in Comminges at the time, but today in Ariège because of administrative redistribution – was a serial rapist. Deprived as a cadet, he lived on expedients as a farm worker. And while traveling from barn to barn, he gave in to his impulses, raping the isolated shepherdesses who tended the flocks. “Justice has retained 22 complaints from victims aged 10 to 18 but there have been without fifty,” said the academic.

Roué vive place Saint-Georges

The predator, who had the trigger easy and always carried his pellet gun with him, also killed a Spanish horse dealer, tried to kill an owner of his village and the niece of the latter, with whom he had fallen in love after the having raped three times.

It is for all of his work that Blaise Ferrage, at barely 25, was executed on December 13, 1782 on the Place Saint-Georges in Toulouse. The executioner did not even make the flower of strangling him before he wheeled him alive under the cheers of the crowd. “The trial is already quite exceptional in itself, since at the time rape was not really considered a crime, notes Jean-Pierre Allinne, especially for shepherdesses who were often orphans placed with peasants”.

A scent of black magic

Unfortunately, no #MeToo from the shepherdesses at the time. But already, therefore, fake news. The myth of the “Cannibal of the Pyrenees”, “of the bear man” was born shortly after its execution under the pen, according to the historian, of Jean-Florent Baour, owner and sole journalist of the Small posters of Toulouse, “A sensational sheet”.

He was the first to maintain the legend that remained alive in the beginning of a Blaise Ferrage leaving to take refuge at the age of 22, at the beginning of his legal troubles, in the cave of Gargas, still visited today in the Hautes-Pyrénées. He would have continued his ignominy there, bringing back his prey to his cave, butchering them to feast on them as Hannibal Lecter’s ancestor. But on this point, which made the headlines in the gazettes, Jean-Pierre Allinne is categorical: “Blaise Ferrage has never eaten anyone and has never set foot in the cave of Gargas. “

The silent sexual predator, with his way of life as a woodman, on the other hand during his lifetime was always surrounded by an aura of “bad sorcerer” rubbing with the Devil. Before being brought back to Toulouse, he, next to Montrejeau, briefly left company with his guards that he had no doubts about the bribes. “And a judge, yet normally educated, nevertheless asked him if he had a mixture on him that can dissolve iron,” recalls the historian. He no longer needed to surround himself with black cats.

* From Cairn editions, out of print but available for consultation in libraries