ABSTRACT
For the savants, the drama of the Terror made manifest the inner dramas of scientific vocation. Often, this strengthened vocational commitments, by exemplifying the struggle against the odds for dedication and objectivity which had always been at the heart of scientific vocational ideology. The theatricality and role-playing of the Terror also had another effect, however; this was to make the period immediately after thermidor into one glutted with heroic images all too easily appropriated for the manufacture of myth. The fates of Cassini and Bailly had shown the disintegration which awaited those who could not make vocation the centre of their being. Against the pressure from the state and from the semi-educated of which the Terror was only the highest power, personal commitments to science hardened. The Terror turned interest into vocation, and vocation into the life-saving and life-committing passion.
