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When Jean-Baptiste Carrier and thirty-two others were tried for drowning hundreds—possibly thousands— of prisoners in the port city of Nantes in 1793-94, critics claimed that such executions had no modern precedent and declared them emblematic of the depravity of revolutionary terror. Historians since have struggled to explain these events, which are held to be among the worst atrocities of the French Revolution. And yet, no one has looked closely at the links between these drownings and the slave trading that made Nantes one of the wealthiest ports of 18th-century France. My research takes up this problem to make visible how the perpetual warfare of slavery entered the metropole through the port city of Nantes and shaped the French Revolution. This is a preliminary report on archival work which means to overturn traditional narratives of France’s export of liberté, égalité, and fraternité to examine, instead, the import and impact of colonial violence.
