The long, blind train of speedy trials drags this idealist into a madness that cuts off the heads of his nearest and dearest, and hastens his own fall as well as that of his idol Robespierre in the aftermath of the Thermidorian Reaction.

His love affair with the young watercolor-seller Élodie Blaise heightens the terrible contrast between the butcher-in-training and the man who shows himself to be quite ordinary in his daily life.

Justifying this dance of the guillotine by the fight against the plot to wipe out the gains of the Revolution, in the midst of the revolutionary turmoil that traverses Paris, Gamelin is thirsty for justice, but also uses his power to satisfy his own vengeance and his hatred for those who do not think like him.

Élodie later comes to be identified with Electra – though, in her affair with Gamelin, where she loves him first for his mercy and then for his violence, and takes a less radical lover after he dies, she also represents France.

The title, Les dieux ont soif, is taken from the last issue of Camille Desmoulins's Le Vieux Cordelier, which criticized the Jacobins; that line in turn was supposedly taken from an Aztec explanation of the necessity of human sacrifice.