Maxime Raymond Bock (born 1981) is a Canadian writer from Quebec."Le «plateau» Rosemont de Maxime Raymond Bock". La Presse, July 26, 2018. He is most noted for his 2017 short story collection Les noyades secondaires, which was a shortlisted finalist for the Governor General's Award for French-language fiction at the 2018 Governor General's Awards.
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He was elected president of the Convention, and helped bring about the impeachment of Jean-Baptiste Carrier, the perpetrator of mass executions by drowning (noyades) of royalist sympathizers. He was subsequently elected a member of the Council of Ancients. During the French Directory, Legendre was elected to the Council of Five Hundred, but was already suffering from dementia.
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390 These executions, especially of priests and nuns, as well as women and children, known as the Drownings at Nantes (Noyades), along with his increasing demeanor, gained Carrier a reputation for wanton cruelty. Some alleged that he ordered young male and female prisoners be tied together naked before the drownings, a method which was called a "Republican marriage", but some have alleged this to be counter-revolutionary propaganda.
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Writing from a Marxist perspective, Crohmălniceanu argued that the novelist was constructing "precipitous ramblings", the signs of "reactionary delirium". He nevertheless approved of "memorable scenes" such as the Noyades: "a somber painting, accomplished with extraordinary power of expression." The volume was received with sympathy by some of the authors who were just then debuting. One of them, Pericle Martinescu, called it "a European-level creation" and Nicodin's "capital work", but argued that the particularities of style made it untranslatable.
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After being returned to jail, the three perished with the second group of priests who were drowned the next night. Only one priest, named Father Landeau, survived the killings because, as an excellent swimmer, he managed to escape during a struggle, jump from the barge into the Loire, and swim to safety.Alfred Lallié, Les noyades de Nantes, 1879, p.90. The only first-person account of these first drownings was a ship's gunner named Wailly, who served on the boat La Samaritaine.
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Painting by Joseph Aubert depicting preparations for a Republican marriage Painting by Jean Duplessis-Bertaux depicting the executions at Nantes. Republican marriage () was a method of execution that allegedly occurred in Nantes during the Reign of Terror in Revolutionary France and "involved tying a naked man and woman together and drowning them".Ruth Scurr, Fatal Purity: Robespierre And the French Revolution (2006) p. 305. This was reported to have been practised during the drownings at Nantes (noyades) that were ordered by local Jacobin representative-on-mission Jean-Baptiste Carrier between November 1793 and January 1794 in the city of Nantes.
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At the same time, the State took control of the birth, death, and marriage registers away from the Church. An ever-increasing view that the Church was a counter-revolutionary force exacerbated the social and economic grievances and violence erupted in towns and cities across France. In Paris, over a forty-eight-hour period beginning on 2 September 1792, as the Legislative Assembly (successor to the National Constituent Assembly) dissolved into chaos, three Church bishops and more than two hundred priests were massacred by angry mobs; this constituted part of what would become known as the September Massacres. Priests were among those drowned in mass executions (noyades) for treason under the direction of Jean-Baptiste Carrier; priests and nuns were among the mass executions at Lyons, for separatism, on the orders of Joseph Fouché and Collot d'Herbois.
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