Republican marriage

Republican marriage (French: mariage républicain) was a method of execution that allegedly occurred in Nantes during the Reign of Terror in Revolutionary France and "involved tying a naked man and woman together and drowning them".

[3] The earliest reports of such "marriages" date from 1794, when Carrier was tried for his crimes, and they were soon cited by contemporary counter-revolutionary authors such as Louis-Marie Prudhomme and Louis Gabriel Ambroise de Bonald.

[6][7][8] As one source describes the institution: At the time Napoleon and Josephine were married (in March 1796), "few people considered the religious ceremony at all necessary: people got married with so much facility, and in so simple a manner, that the exaggeration is merely verbal which states that the republican marriage ceremony was completed by dancing round a tree of liberty, and that the divorce was effected by dancing round the same tree of liberty backwards".

[3] He argues that in Williams' text, the male Jacobin executioners are portrayed as "sadistic, public voyeurs who delight in tying 'counter-revolutionary' men and women into forced positions of sterile intercourse, in a grotesque 'marriage' of the soon-to-be dead".

[3] While the executions of men, women and children by drowning in Nantes is not generally disputed, the factual nature of the "republican marriages," in particular, has been doubted by several historians who alleged it to be a legend.