Hot Terror: Quatrevingt-Treize

In La Machine a Terreur, Laurent Dispot discovers a singular origin for the Terror in the French Revolution: thermodynamics. He describes the founding process that imparts energy to the Jacobin government. The Terror is a closed system, it operates like a machine that transforms revolutionary heat into work. A heat source is used, and the heat flows toward a series of regulatory structures-the Terror contains, diverts, and transforms the original insurrectional energy. “From this point of view,” writes Dispot, “the Terror is nothing but the manner in which an appropriate machine transforms popular heat into governmental work” (73).2 Dispot traces the archeology of this unhappy path, of this energy buildup. First there is the popular insurrection of 10 August ending in the confiscation of the riots by the Jacobin administration in the name of the people.