Les Noyades

Christine reminds us of the dreadful noyades or "Republican marriages" which began in November 0f 1793 in Nantes. Under the orders of the Republican Jean-Baptiste Carrier, those citizens who had resisted the Revolution were stripped naked, tied together, put in boats and drowned in the middle of the river. Many innocent, non-political persons, including young girls and nuns, were subjected to such gruesome murder. To quote:

Details of the practice vary slightly, but are generally consistent with the description offered above. One author described how "marriages Républicains... consisted in binding together a man and woman, back to back, stripped naked, keeping them exposed for an hour, and then hurling them into the current of "la Baignoire Nationale", as the bloodhounds termed the Loire".^[9] British radical and Girondist sympathizer Helen Maria Williams, in her Sketch of the Politics of France, 1793-94,^[10] wrote that "innocent young women were unclothed in the presence of the monsters; and, to add a deeper horror to this infernal act of cruelty, were tied to young men, and both were cut down with sabers, or thrown into the river; and this kind of murder was called a republican marriage".^[10]

According to literary scholar Steven Blakemore, Williams seems to have regarded this as a form of "terrorist misogynism".^[3] Williams' description of the women as "innocent", in his view, "not only suggests that they were not guilty of aiding the rebels, but that they were young 'virgins'".^[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." Thus, "if the Old Regime, for Williams, represents the forced confinement of female beauty, the Terror represents beauty's degrading death."^[3]

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