Feeling as they did, the only logical thing for them was to struggle to obtain power. If they were the “Providence” of France, it was their duty to get to the front. It was not for the sake of power that they made this effort. It was because they alone in their own judgment were sufficiently virtuous and enlightened to carry out the doctrines. They were “called” to preach liberty and a republic, and they went to their work in the same frame of exaltation and expectation as he goes who preaches the Kingdom of Heaven.
The only way in which they could arrive at power was by uniting with one of the two parties in the Assembly, with the constitutionalists or the Mountain, as the Radicals were termed. The former was composed of the well-to-do and the experienced men of the Assembly. It supported the King. It was the more honest and trustworthy, but it was accused of “aspiring secretly to increase the royal authority and to form two chambers.”
The Mountain was the party of the agitators and the street. It had the audacity, the violence, and the populace of the faubourgs. The talents, education, eloquence, refinement, of the Gironde were in harmony with the conservatives, but they could not believe that there was not a secret plot hidden under the patriotic pretensions of the constitutionalists. Their self-pride was irritated, too, by the aristocratic traditions, the courtly manners, and the reasonableness of the moderates. There was a subtile superiority in their wisdom, their gracious bearing, their _finesse_ which the Girondins resented.
As for the Mountain the Girondins feared its violence, its open advocacy of bloodshed less than they did its suspicion. They wanted to be considered the purest of the patriots and they could not support the idea that there was any one who pushed farther than they in making claims for the “sovereign” and for the “divine right of insurrection.” They had not the practical sense, the experience, and the disinterestedness to judge the Mountain, to see that it was chaotic, violent, irrational. Because it called itself the representative of the poor and the suffering, they imagined that it must be virtuous, and they wished its support. They feared its opinion of them even more than they feared the skeleton in the conservative closet.