Republican marriage
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Republican marriage (French: mariage républicain) was a form of human execution practiced in in the city of Nantes in Revolutionary France, "which involved tying a naked man and woman together and drowning them."[1] Most accounts indicate that the victims were drowned in the Loire River, 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]
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[edit] Origin of the practice
This form of execution was favored by influential French Revolutionary Jean-Baptiste Carrier,[4] who is generally characterized as having developed it. One historian described the use of the practice as follows:
- A Revolutionary Tribunal was established [at Nantes ], of which Carrier was the presiding demon—Carrier, known in all nations as the inventor of that last of barbarous atrocities, the Republican Marriage, in which two persons of different sexes, generally an old man and an old woman, or a young man and a young woman, bereft of every kind of clothing, were bound together before the multitude, exposed in a boat in that situation for half an hour or more, and then thrown into the river.[5]
The source further describes the lingering effects of this treatment:
- It was ascertained by authentic documents that, in addition to the adults, six hundred children perished in this horrible manner : and such was the quantity of corpses accumulated in the Loire, that the water became infected, and a public ordinance was issue forbidding its use. For a long time afterward, mariners, when heaving their anchors in that vicinity, frequently brought up the ghastly remains of the murdered victims.[6]
Details of the practice vary slightly, but are generally consistent with the description offered above. Another 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".[7]
Some historians have characterized republican marriage as a form of misogyny, noting that the women involved were "innocent" (i.e. both virginal and uninvolved in any offense), and that the exercise of stripping them nude and tying them to a nude man in order to execute both was essentially a morbid voyeurism on the part of the male Jacobin executioners.[8]
[edit] Origin of the term
The use of the term appears to be a mockery of a previous concept of "republican marriage" as a marriage among members of an elite class. Historical use of the term refers to a "secular" marriage, with books describing parents horrified to learn that their children planned a "republican marriage" instead of being married in a church.[9] As one source describes the institution:
- At the time Napoleon and Josephine were married (in March of 1796), "few people considered the religious ceremony at all necessary: people got married with so much facility, and in so simple a manner, that the exaggeration is merely verbal which states that the republican marriage ceremony was completed by dancing round a tree of liberty, and that the divorce was effected by dancing round the same tree of liberty backwards.[10]
[edit] References
- ^ Ruth Scurr, Fatal Purity: Robespierre And the French Revolution (2006) p. 305.
- ^ William Stafford, English Feminists and Their Opponents in the 1790s: unsex'd and proper females (2002) p. 161.
- ^ Steven Blakemore, Crisis in Representation: Thomas Paine, Mary Wollstonecraft, Helen Maria Williams and the Rewriting of the French Revolution (1997) p. 212.
- ^ Archibald Alison and Edward Sherman Gould, History of Europe from the Commencement of the French Revolution in 1789, to the Restoration of the Bourbons in 1815 (1850) p. 44.
- ^ Archibald Alison and Edward Sherman Gould, History of Europe from the Commencement of the French Revolution in 1789, to the Restoration of the Bourbons in 1815 (1850) p. 44.
- ^ Archibald Alison and Edward Sherman Gould, History of Europe from the Commencement of the French Revolution in 1789, to the Restoration of the Bourbons in 1815 (1850), p. 44.
- ^ John Murray, Hand-book for travellers in France (1843), p. 165.
- ^ Steven Blakemore, Crisis in Representation: Thomas Paine, Mary Wollstonecraft, Helen Maria Williams and the Rewriting of the French Revolution (1997) p. 212.
- ^ See John Sartain, et al., Friendship's Offering (1854), p. 271: "No priest dare marry us, dearest, and I cannot respect a republican marriage!"; Laure Junot Abrantès, Memoirs of the Duchess D'Abrantès (Madame Junot) (1832) p. 294: [asked whether her daughter would be married in a church] "How could you for a moment entertain the idea that not my daughter only, but myself and her brother, could consent to a purely republican marriage?"; Charles Brockden Brown, The Literary Magazine, and American Register (1804), p. 73: "There are many persons here, who are not content with a republican marriage, but get themselves also privately married by a priest, according to the forms of the Catholic religion".
- ^ Charles MacFarlane, The French Revolution, Vol. III (1845), p. 344.
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