Page:Karl Radek - Proletarian Dictatorship and Terrorism - tr. Patrick Lavin (1921).djvu/26

19 had no presentiment of that gentleman's castrated Marxism they sought no "statistical" reasons for abandoning the struggle, but fought with all the means at their disposal, including that of terrorism, against speculation and counter-revolutionary treachery and defeated the armies of the counter-revolution. How little they pursued illusions is shown by their struggle against the Communist current which strove for far-reaching, but at that time unattainable reforms. When the power of the feudal counter-revolution was broken the task of the bourgeois-terrorist Government was fulfilled. Even the bourgeoisie were unwilling to tolerate it any longer. That was the cause of the 9th of Termidor, and of the fall of Robespierre.

This was well understood by Mignet although he wrote his history of the French Revolution almost a hundred years ago, and in the language of the Restoration. He says in his book: "The numerous victories of the Republic, to which its drastic measures or great enthusiasm greatly contributed, made violence on its part superfluous. It was the Committee of Public Safety which held down the interior of France with a strong and terrible hand, and at the same time opened sources of assistance, created armies, discovered field-marshals and achieved victories by which the triumph of the Revolution against Europe was ultimately assured. A favorable situation no longer demanded the same efforts, and the problem was solved, as it is the peculiar characteristic of such a dictatorship to save a country and a cause and to perish itself in the work of salvation. "The opposition which the Jacobin Terror showed to bourgeois private property means for Karl Kautsky no more than the bankruptcy of an illusion. A certain Frederick Engels, however, wrote: In order that even those fruits of victory should be secured which were ripe at that time it was necessary that the revolution should be carried considerably beyond its goal—exactly as in France in 1793 and in Germany in 1848. This, in fact, appears to be a law of development of bourgeois society. ("Historical