Page:Georgii Valentinovich Plekhanov - The Bourgeois Revolution- Its Attainments and Its Limitations - tr. Henry Kuhn (1926).pdf/22

 olutionary layer of the population, least of all in Paris. That part of the population evidently entertained views about "the people" and its interests quite different from those of the Gironde, so vastly admired by Janet because of its magnanimity. It was just this circumstance which brought about the fall of the Gironde and the victory of the Mountain. The former was therefore almost exclusively confined to the forces of "the dilatory and lukewarm middle class." Could anything substantial be accomplished with such allies? No, the moderate and liberal Gironde never would have been able to rescue France from the critical condition in which she found herself enmeshed in 1793.

It was the external situation of France which made the dictatorship, the one of the Montagnards, a necessity. And once there must be a dictatorship then all the talk about a "free, lawful and mild" republic becomes simply ridiculous. The revolutionary dictatorship necessarily had to be as rigid and as ruthless as were the external foes who had called it into being; just like the