Reign of Terror in Nantes, 1793–1794

Nantes became a major centre of revolutionary repression during the War in the Vendée. Representative-on-mission Jean-Baptiste Carrier confronted overcrowded prisons, military prisoners, clergy and suspected counter-revolutionaries.

Executions included shootings and the mass drownings in the Loire remembered as the noyades de Nantes. Disease, administrative breakdown and ideological violence combined to produce one of the Terror’s most notorious provincial episodes.

Lord Tony’s Wife brings its abduction plot into Carrier’s Nantes. The historical machinery of imprisonment and execution protects Martin-Roget’s private revenge and makes the Scarlet Pimpernel’s rescue especially difficult.