"Between 1793 and 1794 some 30,000 were killed in the 'official' Terror alone and tens of thousands imprisoned without trial in over-crowded, stinking gaols. Jean-Baptiste Carrier, the représentant in the rebellious west, turned the Loire into a 'national bathtub,' drowning prisoners in batches of hundreds at Nantes and reporting to Paris: 'We shall turn France into a cemetery rather than fail in her regeneration.' Even though the Terror did not last long, its legacy was the reintroduction of the spirit of religious warfare to a country and a continent which had virtually forgotten it. Both politics and war became black-and-white struggles between good and evil, with compromise or negotiation ruled out of court." David Gordon Wright