The French Revolution was the originator of many things. Ideas of populism, secularism, and more ideals that we consider essential to the modern world came to be thanks to the Revolution. However, it has another legacy that not many people, even those who know much about the Revolution, consider: industrialized mass murder. And that is thanks largely to one person: Jean-Baptiste Carrier.
To call Carrier “radical” doesn’t really do him justice. Carrier was part of the Montagnards, the radical Revolutionary section of the Jacobin Party. However, he was more radical than even most Montagnards. Maximilien Robespierre, the leader of the Montagnards, attempted to reconcile somewhat with religious elements in France by starting his “Cult of the Supreme Being”, the new Revolutionary religion. Carrier, however, favored a complete Dechristianization of France, and he was determined to achieve this goal, no matter how many he had to kill.
Carrier was assigned to be the Committee of Public Safety’s representative in the city of Nantes in November of 1793. Nantes was on the border of the Vendee region, at that time controlled by Royalist rebels. As such, there was much paranoia that the city contained a Royalist fifth column. Carrier was sent initially to simply oversee the provisioning of troops to fight in the Vendee, but he soon grew his role far beyond that.
One of the first problems Carrier encountered upon his arrival was the issue of plague. Nantes’ prisons were already overcrowded, and there was fear that the squalid, crowded conditions would produce disease that would spread to the rest of the city. Simply guillotining the prisoners would only make the situation worse; after all, dead bodies are disease magnets. Carrier devised a way to kill these prisoners quickly and dispose of the bodies at the same time: drowning. So it was that 160 priests and nuns were marched out to the docks of Nantes and forced onto barges that then sailed out onto the River Loire. Once the barges were far enough out, they were sunk. The prisoners, unable to swim due to their bindings, all drowned.
Carrier realized he had a very efficient new method of execution. He quickly assembled a “Committee” on December 4 to determine his next victims. Ultimately this committee named hundreds of people identified as “counterrevolutionary”; all of these people were rounded up and forced again onto barges. Carrier would continue this process 9 more times; entire families were soon drowned in the Loire, with Carrier believing that even the children had been corrupted by their parents’ thoughtcrime beyond repair. Often, Carrier’s thugs would simply drag away anyone who had something they wanted, in order to steal it.
Carrier also added sadistic inspiration to his “invention”; priests and nuns were stripped naked and tied together before being drowned, so they would die having broken their vows of chastity. Carrier called this process a “Republican marriage”; it was born out of his utter disdain for religion in all its forms. By the time the drownings were ending even babies were thrown into the river; this was confirmed by Carrier himself. Ultimately, at least 4,000 men, women, and children would be drowned in what Carrier called the “National bathtub”, and likely hundreds more.
Carrier’s reign of terror ended with the fall of the Montagnards. Initially, Carrier was recalled to Paris to testify at the trial of Robespierre; he was, however, soon accused by countless witnesses to his cruelty at Nantes. At his trial Carrier claimed total ignorance, a strategy that backfired against the weight of literally hundreds of witnesses to his sadism. He was found guilty and executed on December 16, 1794.
Jean-Baptiste Carrier’s sins might seem relatively minor compared to those of other directors of the purges of repressive regimes, and even compared to Robespierre, whose terror killed 40,000 people. Carrier, however, was a man who clearly thought a lot about killing people, and how to do it as efficiently as possible. Carrier created one of the first instances of outright industrial mass murder in history, as thousands of people were drowned without regard to innocence or guilt. He possessed the dangerous combination of sadism and efficiency, and the people of Nantes payed the price.