Drownings at Nantes
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, were cast into the river Loire and drowned on the orders of Jean-Baptiste Carrier, the representative-on-mission in Nantes.
Before the drownings 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".
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.
Heavy losses of inmates' lives recorded by military personnel, physicians, nurses, and even judges, shocked civic leaders and pushed them to try anything to stop the further spread of illness.
But on 25 October, the Revolutionary Committee of Nantes ordered that the priests be sent back to the docks to be held on the barge La Gloire.
Only one priest, named Father Landeau, survived the killings because, as an excellent swimmer, he managed to escape during a struggle, jumped from the barge into the Loire, and swam to safety.
The executions were to be carried out secretly at night, but the committee became worried of public disapproval when the corpses began floating to the surface, sometimes days later.
Two groups conducted the executions: Guillaume Lamberty and his men, and the Marat Company of Revolutionary Guards, known as the 'American Hussars' (French: hussards américains) due to the presence of former Black slaves and settlers from Saint-Domingue in its ranks.
Unable or unwilling to consult their lists, the soldiers grabbed prisoners at random, stripped them of their belongings and money, before tying them in pairs to heavy rocks.
Once loaded onto a flat boat, the guards sailed 129 prisoners a short distance downstream from Nantes to Trentemoult, a fishing village near the island of Cheviré, and drowned them.
This time, Pierre Robin, Fouquet, and their accomplices forced approximately eight hundred captured "royalist sympathizers" of all ages and sexes onto two boats, which only sailed as far as Chantenay and drowned them.
Two-masted Dutch galiots – small trade ships – moored in Nantes as a result of a naval blockade, were moved on this occasion to the quay next to the Coffee Warehouse jail where the condemned could easily board.
[6] Records indicate that the last drownings using these Dutch vessels were organized by Carrier himself, who completely emptied out the Coffee Warehouse jail of all prisoners.
[12] According to historian Reynald Secher, these murders are one component of a systematic policy of extermination of the residents of the Vendée planned by the revolutionary Committee of Public Safety, and approved by a vote of the National Convention in Paris on 1 October 1793.
However, he was immediately denounced by those closest to him and charged with the drownings, executions, butchering of women and children, thefts, and acts of greed, as well as exacerbating the strife that Nantes suffered.
