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CHAPTER 2 – HISTORICAL BACKGROUND 
59 
Venizelos’s defeat came as a shock to the Allies. They were generally, but not 
universally, unaware that there were continuing divisions in Greece and that the 
opposition’s complaints about a Venizelist dictatorship spoke to real resentments
104
; 
The ways of a dictatorship existed in the maintenance, for the three years between 
Venizelos’s return in 1917 and the eve of the elections, of martial law, press 
censorship and the exile of political opponents
105
; The Venizelists were no better or 
worse than their predecessors or successors in distributing public favours, burdens, 
appointments and dismissals by clientelist criteria. At any time in such a system 
there will be plenty of people who feel they are losers under the present government 
and would be gainers under another; but the economic strains of war augmented 
perceptions of undeserved favour or disfavour
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. And underlying all this there was 
enough dislike of the fact that Venizelos had regained office in 1917 not by the vote 
of the people but the armed force of the British and the French
107
. 
The French, whether opportunistically or from a genuine revulsion against 
Constantine, who was remembered as an enemy since the events of 1916, took the 
initiative in attempting to block his return and promptly tabling the idea of revisions 
to Sèvres. Churchill and the War Office, too, had begun to consider whether after the 
Bolshevik victory in the Russian civil war British interests might be better covered 
by a rapprochement with Turkey than by the Greek army. The Foreign Office 
104
Llewellyn Smith, 144 
105
Ploumidis, 253-256. The banishment of certain leading royalists had been the action of French in 1917 but it 
was presented as of a piece with the generality of Venizelist oppression: so Gounaris on 7 November 1920, 
quoted by Llewellyn Smith, 148. 
106
Llewellyn Smith, 142, quoting Danglis and 149-150 quoting Pallis. 
107
A point stressed by Toynbee, 81-83 

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