In order to carry out the government's plan of population control, people were slaughtered by the hundreds and thousands. When the guillotine proved too slow, those rounded up were herded together and blown to pieces by rifle and cannon fire. So great was the slaughter that the Rhone River ran red with the blood of the corpses thrown into it. Jean Baptiste Carrier had a peculiar hatred against children. "They must be destroyed," he roared, and gave orders that they should be butchered. Under his command at Nantes, 500 children were driven into a field, and then shot, clubbed, and sabered as they clung to the knees of their assassins, weeping and crying for mercy. It was Carrier who devised the scheme of wholesale drowning in the Loire. The first experiment was made on about ninety old priests who were placed on a barge that was towed to midstream and sunk. Through cold December nights crowds of poor women, some carrying babies, some leading children by the hand, were driven to the river and loaded on barges to be drowned. Carrier referred to this as, "bathing parties." Prudhomme placed the death toll at no less than one million during this It is important to remember that the system behind the Reign of Terror was the plan of Robespierre to transform France into a Socialist State. There were to be no rich, no poor, only equality. Plans were put forth for every department of life to be placed under State control. Free 51 The French Revolution period of indiscriminate massacres.