Page:Georgii Valentinovich Plekhanov - The Bourgeois Revolution- Its Attainments and Its Limitations - tr. Henry Kuhn (1926).pdf/17

 tain party, as we have seen, conceived the mutual relations of the then existing social classes in a way different from that of the Gironde. The latter "would have it understood that the people included all the citizens," while the former considered only the working class as "the people"; the other classes, according to the Montagnards, were no part of "the people," and were not because they believed that the interests of these classes were contrary to those of the working class. And, strictly speaking, the Girondists themselves did not include in "the people" all the citizens, i.e., the entire French nation of the time, but only the Third Estate. Did they include in the people the aristocracy and the higher clergy? Not at all. Did not Abbe Sieyes himself, who never went so far as the Girondists, in his brochure "Qu'est-ce que le tiers-etat?" set "the people," that is, the Third Estate, without compunction against the small aggregation of the privileged, i.e., the nobility and the higher clergy? The Girondists, who fought the "privileged" far more decisively, no doubt agree with Sieyes