The Republican Marriage (or Murder by drowning) in Nantes...

The Drownings at Nantes by Joseph Aubert

According to listeverse.com, ..."the Republican marriage (French: mariage républicain) was a form of execution that allegedly occurred in Nantes during the Reign of Terror in Revolutionary France which “involved tying a naked man and woman together and drowning them”. This was reported to have been practiced during the noyades massacres that were ordered by a local Jacobin, Jean-Baptiste Carrier, between November 1793 and January 1794 in the city of Nantes."

Most accounts indicate that the victims were drowned in the Loire River, although a few sources describe an other means of execution in which the bound couple is run through with a sword, either before, or instead of drowning.

According to Wikipedia, "...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 genders, 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."

The origin of the term...
"The use of the term appears to be a mockery of the concept of "republican marriage" as an actual "secular" marriage. Books describe parents horrified to learn that their children planned a "republican marriage" instead of being married in a church.

At the time Napoleon and Josephine were married (in March 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" "

According to the blog www.bunniesand beheadings.com, as many as 2,000 prisoners were drowned in the Loire River. Maria Williams described how “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.”

I wonder what other stories relate to this river which runs through the city of Nantes...