Correspomlence of Jean Baptiste Carrier. Collected and translated by E.
H. Carrier. (Lane. 15s. net.)—Carrier was the commissioner sent by the Convention to Brittany in 1793-4 to suppress the " brigands " who disliked the atheistical revolution. He is known to history as one of the most brutal of the com- missioners. He devised the " noyades," drowning his prisoners in batches in the Loire, and he ordered the extermination of the insurgent Breton people, -without distinction of age or sex. After -Robespierre's fall he was very properly guillotined. Mr. Carrier thinks that his namesake's " personal character and political reputation have suffered from undeserved obloquy." He has gone to great trouble in collecting the commissioner's correspondence with the Convention and translating and anno- tating it. The • letters are of interest as illustrating -the revolu- tionary madness that had obsessed a once promising young lawyer, but they do not change in one iota the verdict that successive historians have passed upon Carrier. The cold blooded, almost jocular way in which he reports the " noyades " is horrible. Fifty-eight " refractory " priests were, he says, " at once placed in a ship on the Loire : last night they were one and all swallowed up by the river. What a revolutionary torrent is the Loire ! " It may be true, as the editor contends, that •Carrier did not steal as well as murder, and that he was surrounded by local ruffians who needed no prompting to commit crime. It is certainly true that the men of Thermidor, like Tallien, who overthrew Robespierre and sent Carrier to the block, were just as bad as the " tiger of the West." But two blacks do not make a white. The book simply strengthens the received view of Jean 'Baptists Carrier, whose disciples reign in Moscow
to-day. •
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