Epidemics in Nantes during the Revolution

The risks of epidemics in Nantes under the mode of the Terreur largely contributed to the decision to liquidate as fast as possible and of all the manners the prisoners who piled up in the prisons of the city:

  • shootings, in plain of Gigant;
  • Guillotine, place of Bouffay;
  • drownings, in the the Loire on the level of Chantenay;
  • etc

Were these risks real or were used as pretext? At the time of the settlings of score everyone called upon them for better leaving bleached. If one follows the analysis of Doctor Xavier Bernier, the threat of an epidemic even more serious than that which devastated prisons and hospital is not a doubt. It could reach the town of Nantes and be spread well beyond.

Epidemics in Nantes

In addition to the bacillar Dysentery, the Scale, the Syphilis, the fevers puerpérales of held in layers, some cases of Scurvy, the Chicken pox in the captive children, Nantes must take into account the Typhus exanthematic. This infectious illness qualified at the time of various names - " fever of the camps" , " fever of the prisons" - is the most serious epidemic by far.

The doctors detect very early the presence of it, thus Guillaume François Laennec which announces it to the Prison of Holy-Clear the mid-October 1793 then, a little later Augustin Darbefeuille and Pariset, which see it devastating the Prison of the Warehouse of the coffees. The Prison of Bouffay is not saved and several of the members of the revolutionary Tribunal which sits in its walls of are reached. Goudet, the Public prosecutor, dies about it. The medical personnel and male nurse, the guards assigned to the prisons contract it.

The uncertainty of the terms, the absence of therapeutic suitable do not make it possible to say in which proportions typhus killed the incarceration population. It is certain in any case that it was the principal agent of this " dépopulation" preached by Jean-Baptiste Carrier. The epidemic was stopped only with the discharging of the prisons and the application much more strict of measurements of collective hygiene, it had killed approximately: 3000 prisoners.

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