The costumes in the collection are exquisite ERK.
That's also a very beautiful miniature replica doll with very accurate detail, right down to the tiny slippers.
Frances.
The costumes in the collection are exquisite ERK.
That's also a very beautiful miniature replica doll with very accurate detail, right down to the tiny slippers.
Frances.
Originally posted by Frances
Thank you Frances, I also collect English (Regency) dolls of the same era. The miniature dolls in my avatar with the bird heads are funny too (I don't own them, they reside in a museum in Asia).
1680's French Coin. Front.
Source:- http://www.ufocasebook.com/ufocoin.html
17th century French coin shows UFO image, UFO Casebook Files
Centuries Old UFO coin remains mystery.
An unidentified flying object on a 17th century French coin continues to mystify rare coin experts. Colorado Springs, CO (PRWEB) January 28, 2005 -- After decades of seeking possible answers about a mysterious UFO-like design on a 17th century French copper coin, a prominent numismatic expert says it remains just that: an unidentified flying object. After a half-century of research, the design has defied positive identification by the numismatic community.
"It was made in the 1680s in France and the design on one side certainly looks like it could be a flying saucer in the clouds over the countryside," said Kenneth E. Bressett of Colorado Springs, Colorado, a former President of the 32,000-member American Numismatic Association and owner of the curious coin.
"Is it supposed to be a UFO of some sort, or a symbolic representation of the Biblical Ezekiel's wheel? After 50 years of searching, I've heard of only one other example of it, and nothing to explain the unusual design."
Bressett said the mysterious piece is not really a coin, but a "jeton," a coin-like educational tool that was commonly used to help people count money, or sometimes used as a money substitute for playing games. It is about the size of a U.S. quarter-dollar and similar to thousands of other jetons with different religious and educational designs that were produced and used in Europe during the 16th and 17th centuries.
"The design on this particular piece could be interpreted as showing either a UFO or Ezekiel's wheel, but little else. Some people think the Old Testament reference to Ezekiel's wheel may actually be a description of a long-ago UFO," he explained.
"The legend written in Latin around the rim is also mystifying. 'OPPORTUNUS ADEST' translates as 'It is here at an opportune time.' Is the object in the sky symbolic of needed rainfall, or a Biblical reference or visitors from beyond? We probably will never know for certain," said Bressett.
"It is part of the lure of numismatics that makes coin collecting so intriguing."
Frances.
Last edited by Frances, 14th October 2015 at 23:27.
The Deaths Of Jean Paul Marat & Charlotte Corday.
On this date in 1793, Jean Paul Marat, one of the most outspoken leaders of the French Revolution, is stabbed to death in his bath by Charlotte Corday, a Royalist sympathizer.
Originally a doctor, Marat founded the journal L'Ami du Peuple in 1789, and its fiery criticism of those in power was a contributing factor to the bloody turn of the Revolution in 1792. With the arrest of the king in August of that year, Marat was elected as a deputy of Paris to the Convention. In France's revolutionary legislature, Marat opposed the Girondists--a faction made up of moderate republicans who advocated a constitutional government and continental war.
Attacks on the aristocracy.
Beginning in September 1789, as editor of the newspaper L’Ami du Peuple (“The Friend of the People”), Marat became an influential voice in favour of the most radical and democratic measures, particularly in October, when the royal family was forcibly brought from Versailles to Paris by a mob. He particularly advocated preventive measures against aristocrats, whom he claimed were plotting to destroy the Revolution. Early in 1790 he was forced to flee to England after publishing attacks on Jacques Necker, the king’s finance minister; three months later he was back, his fame now sufficient to give him some protection against reprisal. He did not relent but directed his criticism against such moderate Revolutionary leaders as the marquis de Lafayette, the comte de Mirabeau, and Jean-Sylvain Bailly, mayor of Paris (a member of the Academy of Sciences); he continued to warn against the émigrés, royalist exiles who were organizing counterrevolutionary activities and urging the other European monarchs to intervene in France and restore the full power of Louis XVI.
La Morte de Marat.
Artist Jacques-Louis David.
By 1793, Charlotte Corday, the daughter of an impoverished aristocrat and an ally of the Girondists in Normandy, came to regard Marat as the unholy enemy of France and plotted his assassination. Leaving her native Caen for Paris, she had planned to kill Marat at the Bastille Day parade on July 14 but was forced to seek him out in his home when the festivities were canceled. On July 13, she gained an audience with Marat by promising to betray the Caen Girondists. Marat, who had a persistent skin disease, was working as usual in his bath when Corday pulled a knife from her bodice and stabbed him in his chest. He died almost immediately, and Corday waited calmly for the police to come and arrest her.
Charlotte was executed 4 days later.
Source:- http://madameguillotine.org.uk/2011/...7th-july-1793/
Link to the article below.
In the early hours of the morning of 14th July, after her arrest at 30 Rue des Cordeliers for the assassination of Marat, Charlotte Corday was taken a short distance to the Abbaye prison at the end of the Rue Sainte-Marguerite – a fearsome place with high grey walls topped by small turrets that overlooked the Boulevard Saint-Germain.
A screaming, jeering crowd followed the carriage that took Charlotte there, shaking their fists at her and making occasional attempts to grab hold of her that were swiftly deflected by the guardsmen who escorted the vehicle. Charlotte appeared to notice none of this as she sat, proudly erect and gazing serenely straight ahead, not even looking at the dark Paris streets as they rumbled slowly past.
At the Abbaye, she was greeted by a crowd of surly gaolers and their ferocious dogs, who growled and snapped at her now sadly stained muslin skirts as she went by. Despite her protestations that she had acted alone and not as the tool of the disgraced Girondin party, the authorities were still determined to sniff out evidence of a conspiracy and so it was decreed that she must be imprisoned ‘en secrete‘, in absolute solitude both there and at the Conciergerie, where she was transferred just before her trial a few days later, cut off from prison life and allowed contact only with gaolers and the lawyer who had been appointed to defend her after the one that she had herself requested failed to turn up due to having been arrested himself thanks to his Girondin sympathies.
This probably suited Charlotte very well – she was a serious minded young woman who furthermore appears to have mentally already slipped out of reach to the other side of existence. The hectic, desperately pleasure seeking life in the Terror’s prisons would have held no allure for her.
We don’t know precisely what Charlotte’s state of mind was as she paced the terracotta tiled floor of her damp, gloomy cell but it’s clear that not only had she embraced death but she was also thinking ahead to the judgement of posterity.
‘Ce 15 juillet 1793, an II de la République.
To the citizens of the Committee of General Safety.
Since I have only a few moments left to live, might I hope, citizens, that you will allow me to have my portrait painted. I would like to leave this token of my memory to my friends. Indeed, just as one cherishes the image of good citizens, curiosity sometimes seeks out those of great criminals, which serves to perpetuate horror at their crimes. If you deign to attend to my request, I would ask you to send me tomorrow a painter of miniatures. I would also repeat my request to be allowed to sleep alone. Believe, I beg you, in my sincere gratitude.
Marie Corday.‘
We can only imagine the reactions of Robespierre, Saint-Just and the other members of the Committee when this peculiar request was transmitted to them. However, their imagined bemusement aside, they complied and an artist, Hauër was sent to the Conciergerie during her trial to commence work on a portrait.
Charlotte was still unaware that her lawyer had been arrested and when she stepped into the dank crowded courtroom of the Palais de Justice, next to the Conciergerie and saw another lawyer, Chauveau-Lagarde waiting for her, she felt inspired to write another furious note later when the trial, such as it was, was over:
‘Citizen Doulcet Pontécoulant is a coward for refusing to defend me when it was such an easy matter. The lawyer who did so acquitted himself with all possible dignity and I shall remain grateful to him to the end.‘
As Charlotte had boldly and repeatedly admitted to her guilt and was also adamant that she had acted alone, there was very little for her lawyer to do but he did his best for her anyway, telling the tribunal that her ‘calm, such composure, such serenity in the face of death in a way sublime, are abnormal; they can only come from an exaltation of spirit born of political fanaticism. That is what put the knife in her hand.‘
Corday herself said that: ‘Anything was justified for the security of the nation. I killed one man in order to save a thousand. I was a republican long before the Revolution and I have never lacked that resolution of people who can put aside personal interests and have no courage to sacrifice themselves for their country.‘
Even if the dread tribunal had wanted to save her, they were no match for her own avowed determination to sacrifice herself for the good of France and so it was no surprise to anyone when the terrifying, dark browed Fouquier-Tinville, stood up to deliver a guilty verdict, the gold ‘La Loi’ medallion at his breast swinging to and fro as he did so.
Charlotte bowed her head to the inevitable and slowly left the room, still ignoring the screams and shouts of the mob that had thronged the courtroom. She was taken back to her cell, where Hauër soon joined her to finish his portrait. Afterwards he commented on her ‘unimaginable tranquility and gaiety of spirit‘, while she in her turn commended his work as an excellent likeness.
After this there was nothing to do but sit staring at the bare, damp speckled walls until the gendarmes arrived to take her away to the small, whitewashed, somewhat ironically named salle de la toilette on the ground floor where the executioner’s assistants awaited her with the scissors they would use to roughly cut her chestnut hair short and a long red dyed shift, which she was obliged to wear on her way to her execution in order to proclaim that she had been found guilty of parricide.
Charlotte sat down on the rickety stool in front of them and stared straight ahead, flinching only when the cold steel of their scissors touched her neck, which made the gendarmes laugh coarsely and make remarks about the ‘national razor’. She looked down at the ground, where her hair, which she had once been so proud of lay in thick, long strands around her shoes and then had to quickly look away before fear overcame her.
Once her hair had been cut, the men turned their backs as she removed her own dress and pulled the rough red shift over her head, allowing herself a rueful look down at how it hung so shapelessly around her body. After this one of the assistants stepped forward and tied her hands behind her back then led her outside.
Like all other people who had been condemned by the Revolutionary Tribunal, she was taken out to the pale stone Cour de Mai, which actually seems quite beautiful in stark contrast to the medieval grimness of the Conciergerie. Here, an open wooden tumbril awaited them and without much ceremony she was bundled on to it. Charlotte, a girl from Normandy who had never been to Paris before, turned her head curiously to look at the beautiful Sainte Chapelle as the cart lurched forward and then slowly passed through the ornate iron gates.
The journey to the Place de de la Révolution took over an hour and she almost fell several times as the tumbril passed over the busy Pont au Change, turned on to the Quai de Mégisserie and then bounced alarmingly over the streets. Charlotte looked high above the heads of the curious, staring crowd that had lined the route to watch her pass and instead gazed about her at the city that she had never been to before and which she would never see again. The sky had been dark when she set off from the Conciergerie and now the threatened thunderstorm broke overhead, making many of the huge crowd that had gathered run for cover, their newspapers and aprons held over their heads as rain began to fall in a heavy downpour.
The tumbril rumbled down the long Rue Saint-Honoré past the gates of the Palais Royale where she had spent her last morning of freedom and which was as thronged and buzzing with life as ever. Charlotte, her teeth chattering in the freezing cold and her red chemise soaked through with rain, stared out across the colonnaded galleries and remembered how she had felt that day, full of nervous optimism, fear and excitement as she made her preparations for Marat’s assassination.
Unknown to her, Robespierre and his friends Desmoulins and Danton had gathered together at his window overlooking the execution route and were watching her as she went past. They were not the only ones to watch her in almost fearful admiration – more than one young man was struck by wholehearted infatuation for the brave, beautiful Charlotte as she stood alone in her cart, soaked through with rain, her lovely blue eyes already gazing mistily out into the next world.
They turned down the Rue Royale, at the end of which was the Place de la Révolution. Many of those condemned to death staggered and went pale as she caught their first glimpse of the guillotine, which rose, eerie and macabre in the distance but Charlotte gazed upon it impassively, even admiringly.
At around half past six in the evening, the tumbril came to a halt at the foot of the scaffold and gendarmes came forward to pull the young woman down to the ground. The executioner Sanson’s assistants then took her by the arms and led her to the scaffold steps. She ran lightly up the grimy, blood stained steps, turning at the top to look across to the Champs Elysées and then to the Tuileries. There was an invigorating, autumnal freshness in the air and she savoured every breath as they took hold of her again and led her to the guillotine.
Sanson, the executioner stepped in front of the machine, hoping to hide it from her eyes as she moved towards it. At this time, only a very few women had been guillotined and the men still behaved with careful courtesy, fearful of feminine panics and fainting fits, which would disorder the carefully constructed routine of execution, which was designed to be as smooth and fuss free as possible.
‘Please step aside, citizen,’ Charlotte said firmly. ‘I have never seen a guillotine before and am curious to know what it looks like.’
After the guillotine’s blade had ended Charlotte’s life, one of Sanson’s assistants, Legros who was not one of the permanent crew and had only been hired for the day, immediately snatched her head from inside the basket into which it had fallen and soundly slapped her cheeks. Sanson, who had done his best to treat Charlotte with courtesy and respect, was furious and immediately shouted at him to desist, while the crowd pressed closest to the scaffold recoiled in horror, many of them imagining that they had seen her cheeks blush with outrage.
The Girondin, Vergniaud, one of those who had been condemned by Corday’s actions, afterwards said that ‘She has killed us, but she is showing us how to die.’
Frances.
Last edited by Frances, 15th October 2015 at 13:52.
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=86lczf7Bou8
Ann Hathaway. I Dreamed A Dream.
Song from Les Miserables.
Frances
This was such an incredible story to read, Frances, I couldn't get away reading it. Thank you for making it so much alive. What a brave woman she was, standing up for what she believed in. I don't think murder is the way to go, all the same, but there you go....she did what she set out to do. Thank you for sharing these stories.
The Deaths Of Jean Paul Marat & Charlotte Corday.
On this date in 1793, Jean Paul Marat, one of the most outspoken leaders of the French Revolution, is stabbed to death in his bath by Charlotte Corday, a Royalist sympathizer.
Originally a doctor, Marat founded the journal L'Ami du Peuple in 1789, and its fiery criticism of those in power was a contributing factor to the bloody turn of the Revolution in 1792. With the arrest of the king in August of that year, Marat was elected as a deputy of Paris to the Convention. In France's revolutionary legislature, Marat opposed the Girondists--a faction made up of moderate republicans who advocated a constitutional government and continental war.
Attacks on the aristocracy.
Beginning in September 1789, as editor of the newspaper L’Ami du Peuple (“The Friend of the People”), Marat became an influential voice in favour of the most radical and democratic measures, particularly in October, when the royal family was forcibly brought from Versailles to Paris by a mob. He particularly advocated preventive measures against aristocrats, whom he claimed were plotting to destroy the Revolution. Early in 1790 he was forced to flee to England after publishing attacks on Jacques Necker, the king’s finance minister; three months later he was back, his fame now sufficient to give him some protection against reprisal. He did not relent but directed his criticism against such moderate Revolutionary leaders as the marquis de Lafayette, the comte de Mirabeau, and Jean-Sylvain Bailly, mayor of Paris (a member of the Academy of Sciences); he continued to warn against the émigrés, royalist exiles who were organizing counterrevolutionary activities and urging the other European monarchs to intervene in France and restore the full power of Louis XVI.
La Morte de Marat.
Artist Jacques-Louis David.
By 1793, Charlotte Corday, the daughter of an impoverished aristocrat and an ally of the Girondists in Normandy, came to regard Marat as the unholy enemy of France and plotted his assassination. Leaving her native Caen for Paris, she had planned to kill Marat at the Bastille Day parade on July 14 but was forced to seek him out in his home when the festivities were canceled. On July 13, she gained an audience with Marat by promising to betray the Caen Girondists. Marat, who had a persistent skin disease, was working as usual in his bath when Corday pulled a knife from her bodice and stabbed him in his chest. He died almost immediately, and Corday waited calmly for the police to come and arrest her.
Charlotte was executed 4 days later.
Source:- http://madameguillotine.org.uk/2011/...7th-july-1793/
Link to the article below.
In the early hours of the morning of 14th July, after her arrest at 30 Rue des Cordeliers for the assassination of Marat, Charlotte Corday was taken a short distance to the Abbaye prison at the end of the Rue Sainte-Marguerite – a fearsome place with high grey walls topped by small turrets that overlooked the Boulevard Saint-Germain.
A screaming, jeering crowd followed the carriage that took Charlotte there, shaking their fists at her and making occasional attempts to grab hold of her that were swiftly deflected by the guardsmen who escorted the vehicle. Charlotte appeared to notice none of this as she sat, proudly erect and gazing serenely straight ahead, not even looking at the dark Paris streets as they rumbled slowly past.
At the Abbaye, she was greeted by a crowd of surly gaolers and their ferocious dogs, who growled and snapped at her now sadly stained muslin skirts as she went by. Despite her protestations that she had acted alone and not as the tool of the disgraced Girondin party, the authorities were still determined to sniff out evidence of a conspiracy and so it was decreed that she must be imprisoned ‘en secrete‘, in absolute solitude both there and at the Conciergerie, where she was transferred just before her trial a few days later, cut off from prison life and allowed contact only with gaolers and the lawyer who had been appointed to defend her after the one that she had herself requested failed to turn up due to having been arrested himself thanks to his Girondin sympathies.
This probably suited Charlotte very well – she was a serious minded young woman who furthermore appears to have mentally already slipped out of reach to the other side of existence. The hectic, desperately pleasure seeking life in the Terror’s prisons would have held no allure for her.
We don’t know precisely what Charlotte’s state of mind was as she paced the terracotta tiled floor of her damp, gloomy cell but it’s clear that not only had she embraced death but she was also thinking ahead to the judgement of posterity.
‘Ce 15 juillet 1793, an II de la République.
To the citizens of the Committee of General Safety.
Since I have only a few moments left to live, might I hope, citizens, that you will allow me to have my portrait painted. I would like to leave this token of my memory to my friends. Indeed, just as one cherishes the image of good citizens, curiosity sometimes seeks out those of great criminals, which serves to perpetuate horror at their crimes. If you deign to attend to my request, I would ask you to send me tomorrow a painter of miniatures. I would also repeat my request to be allowed to sleep alone. Believe, I beg you, in my sincere gratitude.
Marie Corday.‘
We can only imagine the reactions of Robespierre, Saint-Just and the other members of the Committee when this peculiar request was transmitted to them. However, their imagined bemusement aside, they complied and an artist, Hauër was sent to the Conciergerie during her trial to commence work on a portrait.
Charlotte was still unaware that her lawyer had been arrested and when she stepped into the dank crowded courtroom of the Palais de Justice, next to the Conciergerie and saw another lawyer, Chauveau-Lagarde waiting for her, she felt inspired to write another furious note later when the trial, such as it was, was over:
‘Citizen Doulcet Pontécoulant is a coward for refusing to defend me when it was such an easy matter. The lawyer who did so acquitted himself with all possible dignity and I shall remain grateful to him to the end.‘
As Charlotte had boldly and repeatedly admitted to her guilt and was also adamant that she had acted alone, there was very little for her lawyer to do but he did his best for her anyway, telling the tribunal that her ‘calm, such composure, such serenity in the face of death in a way sublime, are abnormal; they can only come from an exaltation of spirit born of political fanaticism. That is what put the knife in her hand.‘
Corday herself said that: ‘Anything was justified for the security of the nation. I killed one man in order to save a thousand. I was a republican long before the Revolution and I have never lacked that resolution of people who can put aside personal interests and have no courage to sacrifice themselves for their country.‘
Even if the dread tribunal had wanted to save her, they were no match for her own avowed determination to sacrifice herself for the good of France and so it was no surprise to anyone when the terrifying, dark browed Fouquier-Tinville, stood up to deliver a guilty verdict, the gold ‘La Loi’ medallion at his breast swinging to and fro as he did so.
Charlotte bowed her head to the inevitable and slowly left the room, still ignoring the screams and shouts of the mob that had thronged the courtroom. She was taken back to her cell, where Hauër soon joined her to finish his portrait. Afterwards he commented on her ‘unimaginable tranquility and gaiety of spirit‘, while she in her turn commended his work as an excellent likeness.
After this there was nothing to do but sit staring at the bare, damp speckled walls until the gendarmes arrived to take her away to the small, whitewashed, somewhat ironically named salle de la toilette on the ground floor where the executioner’s assistants awaited her with the scissors they would use to roughly cut her chestnut hair short and a long red dyed shift, which she was obliged to wear on her way to her execution in order to proclaim that she had been found guilty of parricide.
Charlotte sat down on the rickety stool in front of them and stared straight ahead, flinching only when the cold steel of their scissors touched her neck, which made the gendarmes laugh coarsely and make remarks about the ‘national razor’. She looked down at the ground, where her hair, which she had once been so proud of lay in thick, long strands around her shoes and then had to quickly look away before fear overcame her.
Once her hair had been cut, the men turned their backs as she removed her own dress and pulled the rough red shift over her head, allowing herself a rueful look down at how it hung so shapelessly around her body. After this one of the assistants stepped forward and tied her hands behind her back then led her outside.
Like all other people who had been condemned by the Revolutionary Tribunal, she was taken out to the pale stone Cour de Mai, which actually seems quite beautiful in stark contrast to the medieval grimness of the Conciergerie. Here, an open wooden tumbril awaited them and without much ceremony she was bundled on to it. Charlotte, a girl from Normandy who had never been to Paris before, turned her head curiously to look at the beautiful Sainte Chapelle as the cart lurched forward and then slowly passed through the ornate iron gates.
The journey to the Place de de la Révolution took over an hour and she almost fell several times as the tumbril passed over the busy Pont au Change, turned on to the Quai de Mégisserie and then bounced alarmingly over the streets. Charlotte looked high above the heads of the curious, staring crowd that had lined the route to watch her pass and instead gazed about her at the city that she had never been to before and which she would never see again. The sky had been dark when she set off from the Conciergerie and now the threatened thunderstorm broke overhead, making many of the huge crowd that had gathered run for cover, their newspapers and aprons held over their heads as rain began to fall in a heavy downpour.
The tumbril rumbled down the long Rue Saint-Honoré past the gates of the Palais Royale where she had spent her last morning of freedom and which was as thronged and buzzing with life as ever. Charlotte, her teeth chattering in the freezing cold and her red chemise soaked through with rain, stared out across the colonnaded galleries and remembered how she had felt that day, full of nervous optimism, fear and excitement as she made her preparations for Marat’s assassination.
Unknown to her, Robespierre and his friends Desmoulins and Danton had gathered together at his window overlooking the execution route and were watching her as she went past. They were not the only ones to watch her in almost fearful admiration – more than one young man was struck by wholehearted infatuation for the brave, beautiful Charlotte as she stood alone in her cart, soaked through with rain, her lovely blue eyes already gazing mistily out into the next world.
They turned down the Rue Royale, at the end of which was the Place de la Révolution. Many of those condemned to death staggered and went pale as she caught their first glimpse of the guillotine, which rose, eerie and macabre in the distance but Charlotte gazed upon it impassively, even admiringly.
At around half past six in the evening, the tumbril came to a halt at the foot of the scaffold and gendarmes came forward to pull the young woman down to the ground. The executioner Sanson’s assistants then took her by the arms and led her to the scaffold steps. She ran lightly up the grimy, blood stained steps, turning at the top to look across to the Champs Elysées and then to the Tuileries. There was an invigorating, autumnal freshness in the air and she savoured every breath as they took hold of her again and led her to the guillotine.
Sanson, the executioner stepped in front of the machine, hoping to hide it from her eyes as she moved towards it. At this time, only a very few women had been guillotined and the men still behaved with careful courtesy, fearful of feminine panics and fainting fits, which would disorder the carefully constructed routine of execution, which was designed to be as smooth and fuss free as possible.
‘Please step aside, citizen,’ Charlotte said firmly. ‘I have never seen a guillotine before and am curious to know what it looks like.’
After the guillotine’s blade had ended Charlotte’s life, one of Sanson’s assistants, Legros who was not one of the permanent crew and had only been hired for the day, immediately snatched her head from inside the basket into which it had fallen and soundly slapped her cheeks. Sanson, who had done his best to treat Charlotte with courtesy and respect, was furious and immediately shouted at him to desist, while the crowd pressed closest to the scaffold recoiled in horror, many of them imagining that they had seen her cheeks blush with outrage.
The Girondin, Vergniaud, one of those who had been condemned by Corday’s actions, afterwards said that ‘She has killed us, but she is showing us how to die.’
Frances.
Elen
Wow maybe i am her reincarnation lol.I also see 1793 and i was born 197316th of October 1793: execution of Marie-Antoinette by Catherine Delors.
Sorry Frances i could not resist
No one person can ever change the truth, but the truth, once learned, can and will change the person
You must be the change you wish to see in the world when you are through changing, you are through
theonetruth forum status theonetruth facebook
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-qkf0fLU2Ao
One Day More. A Song From Les Miserables.
Frances.
Source:- https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drownings_at_Nantes#
The Drownings. The National Bathtub.
Part 1.
The Drownings at Nantes (French: Noyades de Nantes) were a series of mass executions by drowning during the Reign of Terror in Nantes, France, that occurred between November 1793 and February 1794. During this period, anyone arrested and jailed for not consistently supporting the Revolution, or suspected of being a royalist sympathizer, especially Catholic priests and nuns, was cast into the Loire and drowned on the orders of Jean-Baptiste Carrier, the representative-on-mission in Nantes. Before the murders ceased, as many as four thousand or more people, including innocent families with women and children, lost their lives in what Carrier himself called "the national bathtub.
Catholic clergy and émigrés had been victims of angry pro-republican violence and forced deportations by sans-culottes since the Decree of 17 November 1791 went into force. However, it was the Law of Suspects (French: Loi des suspects) approved by the National Convention of the French First Republic on 17 September 1793 that swept the nation with "revolutionary paranoia".[2] This decree defined a broad range of conduct as suspicious in the vaguest terms, and did not give individuals any means of redress.
Nantes, in particular, was besieged by the tragedies of the French civil war in the Vendée at its doorstep. Threats of epidemics and starvation were always present. Battles, skirmishes, and police actions led to the incarceration of more than ten thousand prisoners of war within its confines, and simply feeding them became enormous burden for the city's residents. To control the situation, the leaders of the National Convention put Jean-Baptiste Carrier, a native of the Auvergne region, in charge of obtaining food supplies for Republican soldiers in Nantes. He soon became responsible for furnishing provisions to the entire local population, as well as for maintaining order and putting down suspected royalist revolts.
Fear that contagious diseases, particularly typhus, would spread from prisoners to the general population reached levels of panic in the autumn of 1793. Heavy losses of inmates' lives recorded by military personnel, physicians, nurses, and even judges, shocked civic leaders and pushed them to try anything to stop the further spread of illness. Ultimately, they chose to empty the jails in the city center and to place the inmates at the Coffee Warehouse jail at the port and on vessels moored in the harbor.
The first drownings targeted 160 Catholic priests, called 'refractory clergy' (French: clergé réfractaire). They were first arrested and held at Saint-Clément Convent, then, in the summer of 1793, at the Carmelite Mission, which had been converted into prisons. On 5 July, they were sent to Chantenay immediately west of Nantes, and held on the barge La Thérèse where they suffered miserably from the sun and high temperatures. Between 19 July and 6 August, most of the priests were transferred to the friary of the Petits Capucins and the Hermitage, which also were prisons, that proved more bearable. But on 25 October, the Revolutionary Committee of Nantes ordered the priests back to the docks to be held on the barge La Gloire.
On the night of 16 November 1793 (26 Brumaire Year II of the French Republic) Adjutant-General Guillaume Lamberty and Fouquet ordered a barge that had been specially customized by carpenters to the docks. They directed O'Sullivan, a master of arms, and his men, to transfer the prisoners and to execute the first 90 priests by drowning. Nearly all died as planned, however, three of them were rescued by sailors on the warship L'Imposant, who gave them spirits and warm blankets. Captain Lafloury was ordered to hand them back to civil authorities in Nantes. After being returned to jail, the three perished with the second group of priests who were drowned the next night. A single soul survived this massacre, named Father Landeau. An excellent swimmer, he managed to escape during a struggle, jumped from the boat into the Loire, and swam to safety.
A gunner named Wailly, who served on the boat La Samaritain on the nights of November 16 to 17, left the only first-person account on the first drowning. He described meeting Lamberty and Fouquet, later, hearing the desperate screaming of the drowning men, rousing his fellow comrades who heard the same cries, and the silence that came after they had been swallowed by the Loire.
Continued.....
Part 2.
The second mass drowning of priests was also led by Guillaume Lamberty. Several men in his guard led by Marat Foucauld systematically stripped 58 clergymen who had been transported from Angers. The priests were then led to a specially equipped barge and taken far from the port of Nantes to the mouth of the river where they were submersed. This time, no one survived.
On the evening of 4 December 1793 (14 Frimaire, Year II), Jean-Baptiste Carrier, key members of the Revolutionary Committee of Nantes, François-Louis Phélippes Tronjolly and colleagues, Julien Minée for the department, Renard for the city, and representatives of the fr:Société populaire de Nantes, all met. In the course of heated discussions, they appointed a jury to name so-called "criminals." The next day, the jury presented more than three hundred names on a list, which became orders for execution. To carry out the judgements, Carrier imagined a radical process he euphemistically called "vertical deportation": rather than deporting criminals to remote penal colony islands, he proposed loading the condemned onto flat bottom boats, and drowning them by casting them out in the middle of the Loire at Chantenay, an adjacent village. The executions were to be carried out at night, in secrecy, however there was concern among members of the committee that corpses would begin floating-up to the surface, sometimes days later. These concerns proved to be justified.
Two groups received the task of conducting the executions: Guillaume Lamberty and his men, and the Marat Company of Revolutionary Guards, known as the 'American Hussars' (French: hussards américains) due to the presence of former Black slaves and settlers from Saint-Domingue in its ranks.
The third drowning, known as the Bouffay Drownings, are perhaps better known than the previous two events. This execution took the lives of 129 prisoners on the nights of 14 & 15 December 1793 (24 & 25 Frimaire, Year II). Led by Jean-Jacques Goullin and Michel Moreau-Grandmaison, the Marat Company went to Bouffay Prison, most of them drunk. Unable or unwilling to consult their lists, the soldiers went at random, grabbing prisoners from their cells, stripped them of their belongings and money, then, tied them into pairs to heavy rocks. Once loaded onto a flat boat, the guards sailed the anguished men only a short distance downstream and cast them off little further than Trentemoult, a fishing village directly opposite Nantes, near the island of Cheviré.
The drownings of 23 December 1793 (3 Nivôse, Year II) were recorded by three different accounts, with the accuracy of least two stories verified and confirmed. This time, Pierre Robin, Fouquet, and their accomplices forced approximately eight hundred captured 'royalist sympathizers' of all ages and sexes onto two boats, which only sailed as far as Chantenay and drowned them.
Among the most humiliating drownings were what was termed the 'underwater marriages'. It is a matter of dispute what constituted an 'underwater marriage' or if they happened as described, but unverified accounts tell of a priest and a nun, stripped naked, then tied together before they were drowned. These drownings were also called 'republican baptisms' or 'republican marriages.
The next executions, from 29 December 1793 (9 Nivôse, Year II) to 18 January 1794 (29 Nivôse, Year II), were known as the Galiot Drownings (French: Noyades des galiotes). Two-masted Dutch galiots – small trade ships – moored in Nantes as a result of a naval blockade, were moved on this occasion to the quay next to the Coffee Warehouse jail where the condemned could easily board. Whether the galiots made two, three, or more drowning 'expeditions' is unknown, however, the lives of two hundred to three hundred victims – men, women and children – were lost on each sailing. At least one boat was intentionally sunk in the Loire loaded with victims in the hold and the hatches sealed.
Records indicate that the last drownings using these Dutch vessels were organized by Carrier himself, who completely emptied out the Coffee Warehouse jail of all prisoners. These executions were perpetrated on the nights of 29 & 30 January 1794 (10 & 11 Pluviôse, Year II) and involved about four hundred people.
Frances.
Thank you Frances, I really enjoy these posts that you make. We may wonder if there has been another agenda on the go. What were they covering up with these murders? Were they maybe getting rid of some people that would be difficult to let live? Did these people know something that they shouldn't for a bigger agenda? I'm only fantasizing here. No matter what it is, you've made the record clear, dear. Thank you so much for that.
Elen
Yes Elen, I know what you are saying.
I am looking for one more story, when I find it, I may take a break.
Some stories I have read (but not posted) have left me shaken inside.
Frances.
Source:- https://archive.org/stream/tragicepi...ge/68/mode/2up
Link to on-line book : Tragic Episodes Of The French Revoloution In Brittany.
By G Lenotre.
part 1.
At that very hour one of the ninety priests, and one only having escaped the “drowning” , was wandering through the streets of Nantes in terror of being recaptured , and horrified at what he had witnessed.
It was Abbe Julien Landeau incumbent of Saint Lyphard.
When in his turn he had been taken out of the galliot, tied to an old monk and lowered into the lighter, he found that the rope which secured his arm to that of his fellow might easily be unfastened,
The two united in their efforts got rid of the manacle, and waited anxiously.
From the motion of the lighter Abbe Landeau soon realised that the heavy craft was going down-stream.
He heard the mallet blows which opened the ports, in gushing torrents the waters pour in, gurgling and unceasing, over-whelming in a mass the maddened and unwary victims, lifting them up and dashing then against each other in a terrible hubub of cries, floating bodies , and suffocation.
The Abbe was a skilled swimmer, taking in tow the old man whom the ruffians choice had made his brother in the death-struggle, he fought his way out of the dreadful turmoil.
Groping in the murk of the whirling water, and thrusting aside the contorted bodies, he reached a port-hole or scupper, and at length came out on the surface of the river.
Lamberty’s boat was there quite close at hand.
The priest of Saint Lyphard’s saw the ruffians grappling with their boat-hooks and holding under water those quivering wretches whom like himself, a desperate effort had carried out of the lighter and heard the heavy blows of the ores falling on their heads.
Escaping from the hideous melee he swam with his right hand and with the other held up his inert fellow.
Soon he was far away from the full flow of the Loire, panting with exertion, alone on that heaving expanse.
What should he do? Try to reach the bank?
Would he not find there other ruffians on the alert, it might be, or timorous fishermen, who would refuse to help him?
Or should he swim with the current as long as might be and ground in some osier-bed or on some sand bank, where he might take a breath?
And afterwards?
Would he, for that matter have strength to keep up for that long?
The weight of his fellow paralysed his movements. In the icy waters, which blinded and choked him, the old monk, groaning at his last gasp, urged the swimmer not to persist, but to save himself alone and let him die.
Yet Landeau persevered, though each valiant stroke exhausted him, his strength began to fail and his burden stopped all progress.
He felt the clutching hands of the old man unclasp as he resignedly relaxed his hold, and yielding to his fate allowed himself to sink.
Frances.
Continued.....
The Pink Church Of Saint Lyphard.
Source:- https://archive.org/stream/tragicepi...ge/68/mode/2up
Part 2.
Thus lightened, the Abbé found relief by floating on his back, and permitted the stream to carry him wither it would, when suddenly through the cold void and stillness a sound of voices reached his ears.
He turned around in the water and saw the outline of a boat gliding through the night, and heard the men who manned it chatting among themselves.
He struck out until he came alongside, seized the gunwale , and in an imploring voice begged for help.
One of the men astonished, lent over and asked him who he was.
A priest that they have thrown in to drown.
There was a brief consultation between the boatmen, while Landaeu , all a tremble overheard their parley.
"Bah", said one "he's a black cowl", there will be enough of his kind left.
"My friends", cried another", if he was an enemy's dog we should not consent to let him perish, let us save him".
The swimmer was forthwith grappled, and drawn from the water and hoisted onboard the barge, but scarcely was he seated beside the boat-men than these rough men took fright at the half dead man, dripping, shivering and at the last gasp.
Already the fame of the Carrier was spreading baseness, as misamas spread pestilence.
After some debate the boatmen rowed towards the right bank, and landing, left the wretch on the sand, explaining that they had done enough for him, and that he would have to get out of the scrape without their help.
Thus left alone Abbé Landeau tried to find his bearings.
In the middle of November the nights are long, and it was still very far from earliest dawn. He saw, however, that he had come to land near the Hamlet of Roche Maurice, about a league downstream from Nantes.
Shivering with cold, almost naked, and faint with hunger and weariness, the first thing he needed was to find shelter.
Would not asking for help mean self-betrayal?
No matter he was at the end of his energies.
Approaching a hovel he knocked, but the door remained closed, he dragged himself towards another dwelling. There his call was heard, some peasants received him with cordiality, and gave him food and seated him before a good fire.
The Abbé began to breath more freely; little by little the awful nightmare faded away.
Dawn was approaching, what should be his next course?
The peseants who had taken him in were growing alarmed; they too were frightened. They were glad, they said, to have succoured him, and would still be more so to keep him, but the villages were infested with patriots, and the next house which he had visited, but had not been opened to him, was inhabited by one of the most ardent of these.
M. Let Cure must understand that, for his own sake as much as for that of his hosts, he could not stay where he was; everyone must look to his own safety, so he must leave before day light.
For that matter they would not abandon him, their daughter went every day to Nantes to take the milk of her cows; she knew a worthy woman there, Mme. lamy, who like the Abbé, came from Queniguen.
No doubt she would be willing to shelter the priest for some days, and would busy herself with placing him in safety.
The incumbent of Saint Lyphard thanked his hosts. They consented out of charity, to let him keep a pair of breeches, a jacket, and some clogs; they furnished him with a basketful of vegetables and bade him adieu.
Thus accounted the priest was shown the door, and with a wary and alert eye, trying to disguise his alarm and affecting the air of a market -gardener, he took the road to Nantes.
He reached the centre of town without mishap, was received at Mme. Lamy's at the Port-au-vin, went to earth there, and from refuge sent a letter to one of his brothers living at Queniguen near Guerande, who came to Nantes, wearing the broad hat, the white jacket, and loose breeches of the marsh men of the peninsula, to look for the incumbent, bringing with him an outfit like his own.
Frances.
Continued....
Last edited by Frances, 2nd November 2015 at 00:12.
Source:-https://archive.org/stream/tragicepi...ge/68/mode/2up
Part 3.
When in order to leave the town, they had to pass the guard, Abbé Landeau, on whom that awful night had left its mark in a morbid timidity , took alarm at seeing soldiers grouped by the door of the guard house.
He was taken with a violent trembling that he could not check; he was like to be noticed and would be questioned, and would not be able to answer.
His brother , who had kept his full presence of mind, pretended to be taking home a drunken man.
He scolded his companion, pushed him about, gave a great cut with the whip on the quarters of the mule the Abbé was riding, and went off at a trot.
The two fugitives thus cleared the dangerous passage without mishap.
The vicar of Saint Lyphard spent the whole winter at Queniguen. It is a hamlet lying on the edge of salt marshes. There he had two hiding places, one at his brothers house, where he lay smothered under a truss of hay, and the other in a hollow west of the village.
At night he went about the country bearing the consolations of his ministry to the faithful.
No one in that secluded spot had an idea what was going on in France. Save for the patrols, who sometimes turned up unexpectedly to make a search at some farm that had been pointed out to the vigilance of the patriots, no stranger ventured into this haunt of the dead.
Often enough the Abbé saw himself on the verge of being taken: he cherished an instinctive and only too well founded terror of the "Blues". But none the less he went all over the Guerande district, carrying consolation to the dying or sprinkling the new born.
The record of baptisms was inscribed by means of a nail on a brass plate which was buried in some field, to be recovered in better days.
One evening at Queniguen some peasants were gathered at the house of the cure's brother, to take part in a night mass which he was making ready to celebrate.
He had already withdrawn the sacred vessels from their hiding place and arranged the simple accessories, when someone took alarm at a sound of some of footsteps in the village. Beware! It was the Guerande National Guard.
In a moment the house was surrounded; the peasants hastily put the preparations for the rite out of sight, the candlesticks returned to their place on the chimney-piece, the chalice was stowed on top of a dresser.
As for the Abbé he had rushed to the steps of the barn, reached his usual lurking place, and slipped under the hay.
The soldiers broke into the house, and called loudly for the "calotin" (frocked gentleman) they were harbouring.
They rapped the walls with their butt-ends and rummaged the stable making a great pother and threatening to burn everything. One of them, raising his eyes, saw the chalice perched on the top shelf of the dresser. What a surprise ! He said nothing, but casting a glance to see that none of his comrades were watching, gave the incriminating object a shove with the tip of his musket, and hid it behind the bulge of the piece of furniture.
The search of the barn was meanwhile proceeding. The "Blues" sounded the piled up forage with their sabres or bayonets, whose points more than once touched the fugitive.
One of the soldiers discovered his presence in that way. The man slipped in among the hay, making to believe to search vigorously, reached the priest, seized his arm, said in a low tone, "don't stir", and going back to his comrades assured them there was no one there, and nothing remained for them but to withdraw.
Abbé Landeau was saved ; but he could not reckon on the recurrence of such a piece of luck, all patriots not being so merciful as the National Guards of Guerande.
For a long time he had been wishing to make his way to Saint Lyphard which he had not seen since his arrest in 1791. He knew that he was beloved there, and could devote himself to his parishioners without too much danger.
Two brothers , Charles and Jean Deniaud, offered to receive him. The latter lived in the hamlet of kerbriant, while the former had a small arm at Kergonan, both places scarcely a league from Saint Lyphard, and remote from the main road.
Saint Lyphard is a village of some importance, on the outskirt of the Grande Briere, a vast expanse of marsh beneath which a druidical forest lies submerged whose trees still stand unseen, buried in the slime up to their top most boughs; and still bent, men say, by the breath of the west wind, which has not blown on them for over a thousand years.
During two days only of the year the Brierons - as the dwellers on the shore of mud are called - are authorised to rummage in the mire and dig out these tree trunks, twelve or fifteen centuries old, and as hard and black as ebony.
During the week the people of La Briere are also licensed to extract peat from these vast swamps, which they retail in "turfs", a fuel in use throughout lower Brittany.
The rest of the time the folks fish in the ponds for leeches, eels, and pike, or busy themselves with rearing geese and cattle.
For La Briere is at once a sea and a grazing tract.
In winter it is a lake four leagues in length and five in breadth, with little depth of water, without waves or ripples.
In fine weather the soil dries, and sheep and cows can graze on it.
On the Saint Lyphard side, at the promontory of Pierre Fendue, it is impossible to tell where solid ground finishes and marsh begins.
The "Blues", as may be imagined, did not venture on to this quaking area.
Abbé Goujon, vicar of St Lyphard, who had remained in those parts since the outbreak of the Revolution, thanks to his perfect knowledge of the marsh, had thrown out all pursuers.
M Landeau was delighted to see him once more and to share his life of adventure.
Frances.
Continued....
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