Page:Georgii Valentinovich Plekhanov - The Bourgeois Revolution- Its Attainments and Its Limitations - tr. Henry Kuhn (1926).pdf/36

 ever, this is correct only in so far as the Montagnards, in reality and instinctively, always strove to defend the interests of the poorest class of the population. This was so because in their conception there was present a feature which, in the course of further evolution, would have taken on a thoroughly bourgeois character. This feature shows up plainly in the speeches of Robespierre. And through it is to be explained the struggle of the Jacobins against the Hebertists, and generally their struggle against the so-called agrarian legislation. But these "agrarian laws," as their adherents pictured them to themselves, contained nothing that was of a Communist character. Private property, and the petty bourgeois purposes closely connected therewith, forced themselves into the programs of even the most extreme revolutionists of that time. Babeuf alone takes a different stand; he appeared in the last act of the great tragedy, when the strength of the proletariat had already been wholly exhausted in the preceding struggles. The party of the Mountain failed just