Drownings at Nantes
낭트 익사형
The mass executions carried out at Nantes from November 1793 to February 1794 on the orders of Jean-Baptiste Carrier, representative on mission of the Convention, in which refractory priests, Vendéan prisoners, suspects and their families were loaded onto barges with trap-door bottoms and sunk in the Loire. Carrier called them “vertical deportation” and “the national bathtub”. Estimates of the victims range from 1,800 to about 4,800, and Carrier was guillotined on 16 December 1794.
In depth
In the autumn of 1793 Nantes, at the heart of the civil war, had to feed more than ten thousand prisoners under the threat of epidemics and famine; Carrier, who arrived on 8 October, took charge of supplying the army and the city and relied on the revolutionary committee, a political police known as the “Marat Company” and Lamberty’s band. The first drowning took place on the night of 16 November, when the Marat Company, nicknamed the “American hussars” because former soldiers from Saint-Domingue served in it, and the adjutant-general Guillaume Lamberty loaded 90 refractory priests onto an adapted barge and sank it; Carrier reported to the Convention the next day that “an event of a new kind” had reduced the number of priests. Only Father Landeau, a strong swimmer, survived. The second drowning took 58 priests brought from Angers. On 4 and 5 December Carrier, the revolutionary committee and the department and city authorities drew up a list of more than 300 names, and Carrier proposed the “vertical deportation” of loading them onto flat-bottomed boats to be sunk in mid-river off Chantenay. On the night of 14 to 15 December the drunken Marat Company, without consulting its lists, took 129 prisoners from the Bouffay prison, tied them in pairs to stones and drowned them below Trentemoult; on 23 December about 800 people of both sexes and all ages died from two boats. From 29 December to 18 January 1794 Dutch galiots held in the port were used, 200 to 300 victims at a time, and on the night of 29 to 30 January Carrier himself emptied the Coffee Warehouse prison in a last mass drowning of about 400. The last recorded drowning, on 27 February in Bourgneuf Bay, killed 41 people including a blind old man, 12 women, 12 girls and 15 children.