These French hounds have led the hunt for thousands of years — here’s why
From ancient cave trails to modern-day packs, Harry Pearson explains why these remarkable dogs have shaped hunting traditions for thousands of years — and why their legacy still endures today.
About 26,000 years ago, a small boy walked through the Chauvet–Pont-d’Arc cave in the Ardèche carrying a burning torch. Walking beside him was an animal. The pair left a long trail of sooty footprints. The paw marks have been the subject of much debate among archaeologists — dog or wolf? To the French huntsman, however, there is no argument: the prints are those of a faithful hound, incontestable proof that, when it comes to using canines to pursue game, France is at the head of the pack.
Whatever the provenance of those paw prints, the certainty is that the French have been hunting with hounds for thousands of years. In the 1st century BC, Julius Caesar and his invading legionaries noted that the Gauls used two types of dog for hunting — smooth-coated sight hounds and shaggy scent hounds. Arguably the most famous dog in the Roman Empire was a Gaulish hound named Margarita. This beloved canine’s marble funerary plaque is on display in the British Museum. It tells us that she was once ‘taught to roam unexplored woodland with courage and chase hirsute game in the hills’. Latterly, however, her owners took her to Rome, where she renounced her wild youth and learnt to sleep on a blanket.
A pack of Grand Anglo-Français Blanc et Noir hounds — known for their stamina and distinctive markings.
Today, there are more than half a million hunting hounds in France, divided into more than two dozen breeds, with more than 150 elite packs registered with the Société de Vènerie, 13 hound clubs and an estimated 400,000 hunt followers. The French hunt boar, red and roe deer, fox, rabbit and hare. Although the terrifyingly ferocious wolf packs that feature in the hunting tales of Alexandre Dumas and Guy de Maupassant no longer roam Gallic forests mauling livestock and eating farm workers, the hounds that once pursued them remain at the ready.
The French are justifiably proud of their hounds, although it is believed that many of the nation’s most famous breeds owe their origins to the Abbey of Saint-Hubert in what is now Belgium. Here, from about AD850, the Benedictine monks engaged in one of the first selective dog-breeding programmes. The result was a long-legged, powerful and heavily jowled scent hound, the Chien de Saint-Hubert (Saint Hubert of Liège is the patron saint of huntsmen, his conversion to the religious life having come about via the intervention of a talking stag). Each year, the monks would send prize dogs to the King of France as a tribute and, as the numbers of their own packs swelled, French monarchs gave dogs to their noblemen.
In the 11th century, some of these dogs found their way to England. They are the ancestors of our beloved bloodhounds. Over time, the French monarchy’s hounds would develop into a distinct breed that was named — with a surprising lack of Gallic flair — Chien Blanc de Roi (the King’s White Dog). It was from this smooth-coated hound, captured on canvas by Louis XV’s court painter Jean-Baptiste Oudry, that many famous French breeds, including the Poitevin, the Billy and the Porcelaine, descended.
The Poitevin is perhaps the most venerable of all French hounds and can trace its ancestry to the region around Poitiers in western France. Originally bred to hunt stags and wolves, many are descended from the pack of a certain Monsieur Larye, a celebrated 18th-century huntsman, who was himself mercilessly pursued by the revolutionaries and guillotined in 1793. Tri-coloured, smooth-coated, tall and powerful, with enough stamina to cover 35 miles in a day, the Poitevin has a Roman nose, runs at a lolloping gallop and has a soulful air that matches its deep and sonorous voice. Described by experts as being ‘reserved and slightly introverted’, the breed is the professor of the pursuit.
A very similar beast to the Poitevin is the Billy. Despite sounding distinctly British, the Billy actually takes its name from the Château de Billy in Poitou, where it was first bred.
The Français Tricolore is, as its name suggests, noted for its three-coloured markings, which give it a look of fashionable élan. Little wonder that the great superstar of the Belle Époque, Sarah Bernhardt, posed with a pack for an evocative painting by Louise Abbéma that casts the actress as Diana the Huntress in a dashing tricorne hat.
More similar in appearance to the original hounds of the Abbey of Saint-Hubert is the Grand Bleu de Gascogne, of whom the French huntsman Pierre de Castets wrote: ‘There is no more noble beast… with his majestic allure, powerful voice and air of aristocratic melancholy.’ The Grand Bleu has a beautiful black, white and tan coat and the heavy head of a bloodhound. As its name suggests, it originated in south-west France, although the breed was fully refined in the mid 19th century by Baron Prosper de Ruble.
The Baron’s wolf-hunting pack gained nationwide renown and made a dramatic subject for the great Parisian painter of hunting scenes, Jules Bertrand Gélibert. The Empress Eugénie was impressed and offered Baron de Ruble a small fortune for his prize dog, Major. An ardent believer in the Bourbon monarchy, the Baron refused to sell.
The Griffon is generally a tall, rough-coated hound of ancient pedigree. The mighty Griffon-Nivernais looks like a descendant of the dogs portrayed in the Palaeolithic cave paintings in the Dordogne. In 1800, a cattle breeder near the city of Nevers, in what is now Bourgogne–Franche-Comté, found his herds constantly harassed by wolves. He sent to a relative in the western province of the Vendée for help.
Thirteen gigantic shaggy hounds — Grand Griffons-Vendéen — duly arrived. In a few years, it is claimed, the pack had killed 200 wolves. The original ferocious dogs were eventually crossed with an English foxhound named Archer and the Griffon-Nivernais was the result. The Griffon-Nivernais is craggy and hirsute, with a faint air of scruffy neglect and a peculiar magnetism. If he were a man, he would surely be propping up a bar in a provincial French town with a glass of vin rouge in one hand and a Gauloise in the other.
A friend of mine returned from a decade working in France with one. Big Rick, as he was known, was a sturdy fellow. When you patted him on the back, he felt as solid and immovable as a three-seat Victorian sofa. Like the Gaulish hound Margarita, Big Rick had adapted comfortably to domestic life in a new land. ‘In France, he was forever chasing prey — deer, hare, wild boar…,’ said my friend. ‘But, when we moved back home, he quickly worked out that if he approached old ladies and looked at them with his big brown eyes, they’d pretty much always give him a biscuit.’ Ah yes, that mysterious Gallic charm to which few seem averse.
The Griffon Fauve de Bretagne has royal pedigree. François I (1515–47) kept a pack. The inhabitants of Brittany are noted for their Celtic fieriness and refusal to retreat, so, naturally, the hound that the locals bred displays similar characteristics. The coat is a rich golden brown, short and rough as a toothbrush. The hounds carry their sterns proudly and their heads upright, giving the impression of being ever ready to serve — or scrap. In Gustave Flaubert’s short story The Legend of Saint Julien the Hospitaller, the protagonist’s father assembles a vast array of hunting dogs that includes 34 hounds from Brittany. Flaubert tells us that they were ‘great barkers, with broad chests and russet coats flecked with white’ — undoubtedly Griffon Fauve de Bretagne.
Although these tall and strapping dogs were certainly wonderful, they did create a problem for the general population. In France, only gentlemen were allowed to hunt on horseback; the petit gens had to pursue their quarry on foot. As even the speediest French man or woman couldn’t possibly keep up with the long-legged hounds, they bred their own short version. Low to the ground, with a sense of smell that would shame the most expert sommelier, these hounds were known collectively as bassets (from bas, French for low, an adjective that, perhaps, also summarised the social status of their owners).
The most famous of the Basset Griffon come from the Vendée in western France. Truncated versions of the giant Grand Griffon-Vendéen that had terrorised the wolves of Nivernais, the bassets come in grand and petit versions (an early depiction appears in Alphonse Daudet’s comic novel Tartarin de Tarascon). Among the French, the Vendée is a byword for the stubborn independence of its peoples, for the roughness of its wild and scrubby terrain and for backwardness. (‘If France is attacked by nuclear missiles, run for the Vendée,’ Parisians quip. ‘Everything gets there 20 years late.’) The dogs from the region are low slung, with thick shaggy coats to protect them from the thorn bushes that form the bocage.
Because the countryside made it hard to see far ahead, the little hounds of the Vendée were bred to produce a baying call that seems to come from an animal at least 10 times their size. I once owned a Petit Basset Griffon-Vendéen, or perhaps he owned me — such were the demands of his Gallic temperament that it was often hard to tell. One sunny day on the Isle of Mull, I sat at the top of Ben Buie and could hear him baying on the beach some 2,352ft below. ‘He’s scented a fox,’ the friend who was looking after him texted. ‘It was so far away, I could only see it with binoculars.’ Both Grand and Petit Basset Griffon-Vendéen have happy faces, carry their tails as upright as a Napoleonic hussar’s sabre and walk with a rolling swagger that suggests a matelot on shore leave.
The Basset Bleu de Gascogne is perhaps the least energetic of these small hunting dogs and, in the past, was commended by one of its great breeders as being ideal for ‘the old huntsman riddled with gout or rheumatism’. The Basset Fauve de Bretagne, by contrast, is a livewire. The smallest of all French hounds, it makes up for this with pugnacity. With a high-pitched call, a wiry wheaten coat and a look in its eye that suggests it will stand no meddling, this little hound has a cocky attitude reminiscent of James Cagney in his The Roaring Twenties pomp.
French hounds have come a long way since that dog walked with the boy across the Chauvet–Pont-d’Arc cave in flickering firelight — and yet their baying call remains as evocative of the Gallic countryside as the sound of the accordion is to the streets of Paris.
This feature originally appeared in the March 25, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.
