Jean Baptiste Carrier

Jean-Baptiste Carrier (1756 – 16 December 1794) was a French Revolutionary.

Carrier was born at Yolet, a village near Aurillac in Upper Auvergne. As the son of a middle class tenant farmer, Jean-Baptiste Carrier and his family survived on income reaped from cultivating the land of a French nobleman. Attending a Jesuit college in his hometown, he was able to pursue a wide variety of career interests. Carrier worked in a law office in Paris until 1785 when he returned to Aurillac, marrying, joining the national guard and becoming a member of the Jacobin Club. In 1790 he was a country attorney (counsellor for the bailliage of Aurillac) and in 1792 became deputy to the National Convention. He was already known as one of the influential members of the Cordeliers club and of the Jacobin Club.

After the subjugation of Flanders he was one of the commissioners nominated in the close of 1792 by the Convention. He voted for the execution of King Louis XVI of France, was one of the first to call for the arrest of the Duke of Orléans, and took a prominent part in the overthrow of the Girondists (on 31 May).

After a mission to Normandy, Carrier was sent, early in October 1793, to Nantes, under orders from the National Convention to suppress the revolt of anti-revolutionists. He established a revolutionary tribunal in Nantes and formed what was called the Legion of Marat, to dispose quickly of the masses of prisoners heaped in the jails. The trial were soon discontinued, and the victims were sent to the guillotine, shot or disposed of in a more inhumane way.

In a twenty-page letter to his fellow republicans, Carrier promised not to leave a single counter-revolutionary or monopolist (in reference to hoarders and aristocratic land owners) at large in Nantes. His vigorous action was endorsed by the Committee of Public Safety, and in the following days Carrier put large numbers of prisoners aboard vessels with trap doors for bottoms, and sunk them in the Loire river. These executions, especially of priests and nuns, as well as women and children, known as the Drownings at Nantes (Noyades), along with his increasing demeanor, gained Carrier a reputation for wanton cruelty. Some alleged that he ordered young male and female prisoners be tied together naked before the drownings, a method which was called a "Republican marriage", but this accusation was later found to be a rumor started by counter-revolutionaries.

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