Republican marriage

Painting by Joseph Aubert depicting preparations for a Republican marriage
Painting by Jean Duplessis-Bertaux depicting the executions at Nantes.

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".[1] This was reported to have been practised during the drownings at Nantes (noyades) that were ordered by local Jacobin representative-on-mission Jean-Baptiste Carrier between November 1793 and January 1794 in the city of Nantes. Most accounts indicate that the victims were drowned in the river Loire, although a few sources describe an alternative means of execution in which the bound couple is run through with a sword, either before,[2] or instead of drowning.[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.[4][5]

  1. ^ Ruth Scurr, Fatal Purity: Robespierre And the French Revolution (2006) p. 305.
  2. ^ William Stafford, English Feminists and Their Opponents in the 1790s: unsex'd and proper females (2002) p. 161.
  3. ^ Steven Blakemore, Crisis in Representation: Thomas Paine, Mary Wollstonecraft, Helen Maria Williams and the Rewriting of the French Revolution (1997) p. 212.
  4. ^ Louis-Marie Prudhomme, Histoire Générale Et Impartiale Des Erreurs, Des Fautes Et Des Crimes Commis Pendant La Révolution Française, Tome III (1797), p. vii (referring to "Mariages républicains à Nantes. Deux personnes de différens sexes, nuds, étaient attachées ensemble, on les précipitait ensuite en masse dans la Loire" [Republican marriages in Nantes. Two people of different sexes, nude, were attached together, then put en masse into the Loire].
  5. ^ "The dreadful invention of the republican marriages passes the genius of man", Louis Gabriel Ambroise de Bonald, Théorie du pouvoir politique et religieux dans la société civile (1796), p. 558.