Drownings at Nantes

The Drownings at Nantes (French: Noyades de Nantes) were a series of mass executions by drowning during the Reign of Terror in Nantes, France, that occurred between November 1793 and February 1794. During this period, anyone arrested and jailed for not consistently supporting the Revolution, or suspected of being a royalist sympathizer, especially Catholic priests and nuns, was cast into the Loire and drowned on the orders of Jean-Baptiste Carrier, the representative-on-mission in Nantes. Before the murders ceased, as many as four thousand or more people, including innocent families with women and children, died in what Carrier himself called "the national bathtub".

Catholic clergy and émigrés had been victims of angry pro-republican violence and forced deportations by sans-culottes since the Decree of 17 November 1791 went into force. However, it was the Law of Suspects (French: Loi des suspects) approved by the National Convention of the French First Republic on 17 September 1793 that swept the nation with "revolutionary paranoia". This decree defined a broad range of conduct as suspicious in the vaguest terms, and did not give individuals any means of redress.

Nantes, in particular, was besieged by the tragedies of the French civil war in the Vendée at its doorstep. Threats of epidemics and starvation were always present. Battles, skirmishes, and police actions led to the incarceration of more than ten thousand prisoners of war within its confines, and simply feeding them became enormous burden for the city's residents. To control the situation, the leaders of the National Convention put Jean-Baptiste Carrier, a native of the Auvergne region, in charge of obtaining food supplies for Republican soldiers in Nantes. He soon became responsible for furnishing provisions to the entire local population, as well as for maintaining order and putting down suspected royalist revolts.

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