Jean-Baptiste Carrier
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Jean-Baptiste Carrier (1756 – November 16, 1794) was a French Revolutionary, known for his cruelty to his enemies, especially to clergy.
[edit] Biography
Carrier was born at Yolet, a village near Aurillac in Upper Auvergne. In 1790 he was a country attorney (counsellor for the bailliage of Aurillac) and in 1792 became deputy to the National Convention. He was already known as one of the influential members of the Cordeliers club and of that of the Jacobin Club. After the subjugation of Flanders he was one of the commissioners nominated in the close of 1792 by the Convention, and sent into that country. In the following year he took part in establishing the Revolutionary Tribunal. He voted for the execution of King Louis XVI of France, was one of the first to call for the arrest of the duke of Orleans, and took a prominent part in the overthrow of the Girondists (on May 31).
After a mission to Normandy, Carrier was sent, early in October 1793, to Nantes, under orders from the Convention to suppress the revolt there by the most severe measures. He established a revolutionary tribunal, and formed a body of desperate men, called the Legion of Marat, to dispose quickly of the masses of prisoners heaped in the jails. The form of trial was soon discontinued, and the victims were sent to the guillotine or shot or cut down in the prisons en masse. He also had large numbers of prisoners put on board vessels with trap doors for bottoms, and sunk in the Loire. There may well have been a sexual motive to some of the developments he introduced to the killings, including the proposal that young male and female prisoners be tied together naked before the drownings.
This process, known as the Noyades of Nantes, gained Carrier a reputation for wanton cruelty. In his mission to Normandy he had been very moderate, and it has been suggested that his mind had become unbalanced by the atrocities committed by the Vendean and royalist armies. Naturally, the stories told of him are not all true. He was recalled by the Committee of Public Safety on February 8, 1794, took part in the attack on Robespierre on the 9th Thermidor, but was himself brought before the Revolutionary Tribunal on the 11th and guillotined on the 16th of November 1794.
See Comte Fleury, Carrier à Nantes, 1793-1794 (Paris, 1897); Alfred Lallié, J. B. Carrier, représentant du Cantal à la Convention 1756-1794 d'après de nouveaux documents (Paris, 1901).
[edit] References
- This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition, a publication now in the public domain.
