Welcome to the Place du Bouffay, which for centuries was the city's stage for justice and punishment. It takes its name from the Bouffay castle, a ducal castle first built more than a thousand years ago, which later became the seat of the city's government and courts, with a prison. It was demolished more than a hundred years ago, and as you've just seen, its clock went to live on Sainte-Croix. About three hundred years ago, Louis the Fifteenth was the King of France. He inherited the French throne when he was only five years old. His father, grandfather, and older brother had all died before Louis the Fourteenth, his great-grandfather. Louis was far too young to govern, so France was ruled by a regent, Philippe, Duke of Orléans. His government tried to raise money and strengthen royal control over the regions. In Brittany, a group of nobles believed these policies threatened their traditional rights. So, the nobles opposed new taxes, outside officials, and the growing power of the central government. They wanted Breton privileges respected and hoped Spain might support them. They rose against the king, and this movement became known as the Pontcallec Conspiracy, named after its leading figure, the Marquis de Pontcallec. It never became a full-scale war. Royal troops entered Brittany, arrested the conspirators, and ended the revolt. Four of their leaders, the Marquis de Pontcallec and three companions, were beheaded on this square after a special court. The plotters who had fled abroad were beheaded too, in effigy, as stand-in figures. A generation later, the Bouffay prison held a very different rebel. Marion du Faoûet was a Breton woman who led a band of thieves on the roads of Brittany. She was arrested in Nantes, held in the Bouffay prison, and later hanged in Quimper, in western Brittany. Since then, she has become a figure of Breton legend, part bandit, part folk heroine. And here is one of the darkest stories you’ll hear today. During the French Revolution came a period called the Terror, when the revolutionary government turned on anyone it suspected of being an enemy, and executions came in waves. South of the Loire, in the Vendée, Catholic and royalist country people had risen against the Revolution, and the war there was brutal. Then, the National Convention, the revolutionary assembly in Paris, sent Jean-Baptiste Carrier to Nantes to secure the city for the revolutionary government. He was an official with extraordinary powers. It's said that in those days, the guillotine stood right here on the Bouffay in those months. Then, under Carrier's authority, prisoners were drowned in the Loire. Men, women and children, many of them from the Vendée, along with priests who had refused to swear loyalty to the Revolution, were loaded onto flat-bottomed barges, taken out into the river, near Chantenay, and sunk. These were the Noyades, the drownings of Nantes. One historian's careful estimate is that one thousand to four thousand people were drowned on Carrier's orders. Carrier himself was later tried in Paris and sent to the guillotine. Take a moment here, and then follow the map to the next stop.