In the view of its participants, the Paris Congress of 1889 was trying to restore the International which had been founded a quarter of a century before. Between the final congress of the First International in 1872, and the foundation congress of the Second, several international Labour congresses had met. Hitherto, none of them had succeeded in re-establishing the institution. Even the Second International, which came to play such an important role in the history of Socialism, came into existence without even a rudimentary organization. There was no executive committee or secretariat, there were no rules and there was not even a title[1]—the term 'Second International' being informally but widely used by writers and historians, who saw in it a reincarnation of the First.
It will be recalled that, in contrast, the First International had its Provisional General Council elected at the foundation meeting, and that it was duly authorized by that meeting to draft a statement of principles and a body of rules. The Provisional Rules and what came to be known as the Inaugural Address were discussed by the General Council at its first few meetings and adopted in little more than a month. From the start, therefore, the First International had both a constitution and an effective organization.
The Second International, on the other hand, remained for the first eleven years of its existence without any formal organization. Only at its fourth congress, held in London in 1896, was a committee authorized to investigate the possibility of establishing a central commission, and only at the Paris Congress in 1900 was it finally decided to set up such a permanent body, together with a 'paid international Secretariat'. Until the setting-up of this Secretariat, the Second International had no existence apart from its congresses. The party of the country in which a congress met was responsible for calling and organizing it, and for meeting the not inconsiderable expenses involved. Apart from this, it enjoyed no executive authority. Apart from its congresses, therefore, which met at intervals of two, three or four years, the International, during these first eleven years, had no organization holding together the member parties and, in particular, no body with authority to speak on its behalf.
The International set up such an organization in 1900 in the form of a central commission, which assumed the title of the 'International Socialist Bureau'. Congress entrusted it with the functions of maintaining effective liaison between the parties, and the organization of future congresses, including the preparation of the agenda. In addition, congress required it to 'pronounce publicly on all vital and major issues of the day which affect the interests of the working class'. Victor Adler, who had been partly responsible for the decision to set up the International Socialist Bureau, confirmed that it was a landmark in the development of the International. 'What seemed an unattainable dream at the time of the first congress at Paris in 1889,' he declared, 'has now, as a result, become more nearly a tangible reality. International Social Democracy has developed from a stage of casual contact and mutual sympathy to one of solid organization.'[2]
In addition to setting up the International Socialist Bureau, the Paris Congress also instituted an Inter-Parliamentary Committee, consisting of Deputies from all countries in which the parties enjoyed parliamentary representation, with the object of 'ensuring uniformity of political (i.e. parliamentary) action'.
Each party was represented on the bureau by two delegates, so that its meetings became miniature congresses. The bureau was required by rule to meet annually, but the Executive Committee, elected by the Bureau, had power to convene extraordinary sessions. The congress had chosen Brussels, as the capital of a neutral country, to be the seat of the Secretariat. So as to ensure continuity on the Executive, the bureau entrusted the offices of president, secretary and treasurer to members of the Belgian delegation. Émile Vandervelde (1866–1938), the outstanding leader of the Belgian Labour party, became president, an office which he retained until the collapse of the International during the First World War. Victor Serwy was secretary until 1905, when he was replaced by Camille Huysmans.
The First International had tried to establish an effective centralization of working-class power, 'so as to be able to concentrate the collective, organized might of the working class at whichever point became the centre of class struggle'.[3] At the same time it had functioned as the central leadership of the international Labour movement, 'the framework of a single, united organization', as Wilhelm Liebknecht described it in his opening speech to the foundation congress of the Second International. The Second International, however, could function only as a loose federation of autonomous and tightly organized national parties.
Although the foundation congress of the Second International scarcely touched on the problem of organization,[4] it took one step which, without being intended or planned as such, initiated joint action which made the International a reality in the minds of millions of workers throughout the world. This was the decision 'to organize, for 1 May, a great international demonstration, organized in such a way', declared the resolution, that on the same day 'the workers in all lands and cities will simultaneously demand from the powers-that-be a limitation of the working day to eight hours'.
The question of a mass demonstration in favour of the eight-hour day had already been mooted, in 1888, by the French, American and Belgian Trade Union Congresses. Specifically, the American Trade Union Congress, meeting at St Louis in December 1888, had decided to organize mass demonstrations throughout the United States on 1 May the following year. Raymond Lavigne, the French trade-union leader who brought up the question at the International's congress, suggested that 1 May be fixed as the day for the international demonstrations, following the lead of the Americans.
Lavigne's proposal was not on the original congress agenda. It was raised suddenly and without warning shortly before the congress closed, and was carried without debate. It seemed as though none of the delegates grasped, at the time, the significance of the decision. Only after the congress dispersed was the question raised as to what form the demonstration should take. The resolution had not been explicit, saying merely that the workers should 'organize the demonstrations by means and along lines appropriate to their respective countries'. The French and Austrians decided to celebrate 1 May with a general strike, the Germans and British by holding mass meetings on the first Sunday in May and the parties of most other countries with meetings on the evening of 1 May. This was not quite in line with the spirit and wording of the resolution, which called on the workers to display their international solidarity 'simultaneously in all countries on a given day'.
In spite of this, the first May Day meetings in 1890 constituted a turning-point in the history of Socialism. For the first time a resolution passed at a congress of the International had set millions of workers, of both hemispheres, in motion. In France, on 1 May, work stopped in 138 towns and in the mining areas of the départments of Allier, Gard and Loire; in Milan, Turin, Leghorn, Lugo and other Italian towns, the workers marched through the streets in close formation; in the towns of Belgium, some 340,000 took part in the demonstrations; in Portugal, 14,000 came out; even in Warsaw and Lodz, despite Tsarist police terror, there were 8,000; in Barcelona, 100,000; in Stockholm, 120,000 attended a mass meeting addressed by August Palm and Hjalmar Branting, and the Socialist paper, the Social-Demokraten, appeared in red print.
The May Day demonstrations had a particular significance in the British Labour movement. Friedrich Engels watched the enormous demonstration in Hyde Park, in the centre of London, from the roof of a goods van. 'Around the seven platforms of the Central Committee thick crowds, in countless numbers, approaching with music and flags, more than 100,000 in a column, swelled by almost as many who had come on their own …,' he wrote, adding that 'on 4 May 1890, the English working class joined up in the great international army.…Its long winter sleep…is broken at last. The grandchildren of the old Chartists are entering the line of battle.'[5]
In Austria, too, the May Day celebrations 'worked wonders', as Adler recounted. 'Entire layers of the working class, with which we would otherwise have made no contact, have been shaken out of their lethargy.…We have drawn new strength from May Day and the demonstrations have been like a plough over virgin lands. The idea of May Day has taken root in the hearts of workers whom we could never have reached with our programmes and speeches, and the impression will never be lost.'[6] The party's propaganda at public meetings and inside the factories for a mass cessation of work on May Day had a powerful effect. The bourgeois Press had been full of the horrors of revolution, to which, it claimed, the May Day campaign was merely a prelude. The Emperor convened a meeting of the Privy Council to reassure himself that the necessary counter-measures had been taken by the government.[7] The Minutes of the Privy Council, meeting on 8 April 1890, make it clear that 'His Majesty…is pleased with the energetic steps taken.…The proposal to cease work on 1 May is illegal.…His Majesty most graciously wishes to stress that the Government will act decisively…[because] it is vital that we meet the suspicious growth of mass unrest with the utmost vigour.' Croation and Bosnian troops were concentrated in Vienna, Hungarian and Polish troops in Bohemia, German and Czech troops in Polish Galicia, and artillery was trained on the streets of industrial towns. 'The soldiers are prepared, the doors of the houses are locked, families are laying in supplies as though for a siege, the shops are shut tight, women and children are afraid to go out, everywhere there is an oppressive atmosphere of anxiety. …'—in these terms a leading Viennese paper described the mood of the middle classes on the eve of 1 May.[8]
This May Day went by in Austria, however, without serious incident; only in the following year did the employers take their revenge for the provocation by locking out the workers in Bohemia, Silesia and Carinthia. In France, on the other hand, the very first May Day demonstrations led to clashes with the authorities and in the following year to street fighting in Fourmies, in the department du Nord, in which ten men, women and children were killed and many more wounded. The so-called 'ringleaders' were prosecuted, among them Paul Lafargue, who was given a year's imprisonment.
By contrast, German Social Democracy, the oldest and strongest party in the International, had refused to call on the workers to stop work on May Day, confining itself instead to public meetings on the first Sunday in May. This attitude embittered the French Socialists and caused keen disappointment in Austria. Both parties proposed a resolution at the Brussels Congress in 1891, which pledged all the parties to celebrate May Day on the first of the month. 'The 1 May is the day for joint demonstrations by the workers of all countries,' the resolution declared, 'at which the workers display the solidarity and publicize their demands.' The resolution went on to commit the parties to call strikes on 1 May. 'The day of demonstrations is to be a day on which work ceases, in so far as this is not rendered impossible by conditions in the various countries.'
However, although the Germans (like all other parties, with the exception of the English) voted for the resolution, they still insisted on not calling a strike on May Day, only going so far as to change the date for the demonstrations from the first Sunday in May to the evening of 1 May. Adler tried unsuccessfully to persuade them to alter the decisions at the party congress in Berlin in 1892, which he attended as the Austrian delegate. He reminded the German Social Democrats of the real meaning of May Day. Only through these celebrations, he declared, had the International made its impact on the minds of the people, because 'the knowledge that at a given hour, on the same day, wherever capitalist power prevails, the workers are filled with one idea, gives a deeper and more genuinely revolutionary content to the occasion than mere preoccupation with labour legislation'. The moment when the workers of many countries simultaneously defied the might of capital was 'at the same time a religious moment' and 'a moment of enthusiasm'—elements which were very necessary in the development of the movement.[9]
The German party, however, considered that the question of stopping work on 1 May involved deep political issues, since it related to the controversial topic of the general strike as a political weapon—an issue which was later to involve the party in bitter internal disputes. Moreover, the party in Germany felt itself threatened by another wave of reaction. When the Paris Congress assembled in 1889, the Anti-Socialist Law was still in force. It was due to lapse with the dissolution of the Reichstag in October 1890. In the elections for a new Reichstag, the Social Democrats made immense strides, receiving nearly one and a half million out of the seven million votes cast. The Anti-Socialist Law had failed to stem the advance of social democracy. Bismarck now realized that the general franchise, which he had introduced in order to win mass support for his conception of the German national state, was the biggest mistake of his whole career. He intended to devote the remaining years of his life to rectifying the error, and to replace the old Anti-Socialist Law by a new and much more severe one which would exclude the Socialists from the Reichstag. He intended to introduce by means of a coup d'état a new electoral law which would withdraw the right to vote or conduct political activity from all who 'had been proved to harbour revolutionary ideas'; also, in particular, he would withdraw the secret ballot.[10]
Bismarck's plan for a coup d'état, which he submitted to the Privy Council on 2 March 1890, was rejected by the Kaiser, who did not want to start his reign with a civil war. But the danger of a coup d'état remained latent. Would not a general strike on May Day renew the danger? Bebel made this point in a speech to the Zurich Congress of the International, in which he explained why his party could not vote for a resolution committing them to a May Day strike. Any attempt to honour such a commitment, he maintained, would 'bring about, as nowhere else in the world, a head-on collision with the bourgeoisie and the government'. And he added, 'if we want such a struggle, we should prefer to choose our own time.'[11]
The Zurich Congress in 1893 strengthened the earlier Brussels resolution on a May Day demonstration. It pledged the parties to at least 'attempt' strike by the workers on 1 May. But, however great the national and local variations, May Day became, for many generations, an occasion for expressing in world-wide demonstrations the international solidarity of the working class.[12]
Besides the controversy over the way in which May Day was to be celebrated, another problem had to be faced at the inception of the Second International—the problem of its relations with the Anarchist movement. What was involved was not only a question of basic principle; more immediately relevant issues were those of the tactics and methods of working-class struggle, the attitude of the workers towards the state and Parliament, towards the value of political action and social reform. These questions had already been debated at congresses of the First International, which had, in fact, foundered as a direct result of the struggle between Anarchists and 'state Socialists'.
Participation in the Paris Congress of 1889 was not limited to those holding particular views about the nature of Socialism or the ways in which it would be achieved. Invitations went out to all the Socialist workers' organizations and to the trade unions. Anarchist delegates attended, therefore, from France, Italy, Spain, Holland and Germany. Immediately the conflict between the methods and principles of Anarchism and Socialism broke out afresh.
Prominent on the congress agenda was the question of Labour legislation. According to Social Democratic ideas the campaign for such legislation was meaningless without a parallel struggle for influence in parliamentary bodies. The Anarchist speakers—Francesco Saverio Merlino from Italy, Sébastian Faure from France, and Domela Nieuwenhuis from Holland—rejected all forms of working-class political action, including participation in elections and demands for social legislation. The Anarchists saw themselves as a tiny minority, confronting a huge majority of delegates who had no sympathy for their views. The vehemence of their reaction was in inverse ratio to their numerical strength. The most trivial procedural matters provoked them to violent protest, which threatened to reduce the congress to shambles. The chairman was compelled, with some embarrassment, to order the ejection of the Anarchists from the hall. This in no way solved the problem of Anarchist participation. The expedient adopted at the following congress, in Brussels in 1891, of declaring the Anarchist mandates invalid, came no nearer to a lasting solution. Congress was forced to decide once and for all who was and who was not eligible to attend.
The problem was thrashed out at a preliminary meeting, called to prepare for the Zurich Congress of 1893. Without weakening the universal character of the International, it was impossible to restrict membership to those holding certain approved theories of Socialism. A majority of the Dutch Labour movement, led by Nieuwenhuis, still had Anarchist leanings, most of the French trade unions were syndicalist, while in England the unions were not even nominally Socialist. The Brussels pre-Conference, therefore, proposed to admit trade-union representatives unconditionally to future conferences, while restricting political representation to those parties which acknowledged the 'necessity of political action'. The proposal was put on the agenda for the Zurich Congress.
The Zurich Congress was significant for the participation of an official delegation from the British trade-union movement, led by John Hodge, a representative of the Parliamentary Committee and president of the Trades Union Congress. Friedrich Engels, who also attended, was welcomed with great enthusiasm and elected honorary president at the final session of the congress.
When the congress assembled, it was soon plunged into controversy over the recognition of political action as a condition of future membership. Bebel, Adler, Kautsky and Otto Lang proposed that an explanatory clause should be added to the resolution to the effect that: 'By political action we mean that the workers' parties should make full use of political and legal rights in an attempt to capture the legislative machine and use it in the interests of the working class and for the capture of political power.'
This formulation naturally provoked the violent opposition of the Anarchists, particularly of the two Germans, W. Werner, the printer, and Gustav Landauer, the writer, representatives respectively of two small German groups known as the 'Young Ones' and the 'Independents'. But their arguments failed to carry conviction and the resolution was adopted, with fourteen countries voting in favour and only two Germans against—France and Poland abstaining. When the vote was announced, the Anarchists in the body of the hall and in the gallery began a storm of protest and tried to rush the platform. Proceedings were suspended while the chairman directed the stewards to remove a number of the Anarchists, including Werner and Landauer, from the hall.
The Anarchists did not let things rest with the decision at Zurich, but demanded at the next congress that the debate on the question of eligibility should be reopened. This congress met in London, at the invitation of the British T.U.C., in July 1896. It was much better attended than any previous congress of the International, with 776 representatives from twenty countries. Of these, however, 465 were from Britain and included all the leading figures in the trade-union and Labour movements: Edward Cowey, President of the T.U.C.'s Parliamentary Committee, who formally opened the congress, Keir Hardie, Chairman of the I.L.P., Ben Tillett of the Dockers and Tom Mann of the Engineers, in addition to Hyndman, Quelch, Lansbury and Belfort Bax of the Social Democratic Federation, Sidney and Beatrice Webb, Bernard Shaw and Ramsay MacDonald from the Fabians—only William Morris was absent, through illness.
The French delegation numbered 133, representing all trends in the Labour movement—Marxists, Possibilists, Allemanists, Blanquists, Anarchists and syndicalist trade unionists under the leadership of Ferdinand Pelloutier, Raymond Lavigne and Marcel Sembat, in addition to Alexandre Millerand and René Viviani, representing the forty-nine Socialist M.P.s. A comparatively unknown delegate from France, appearing for the first time at a congress, was Jean Jaurès. His first speech, 'repeatedly interrupted by thunderous applause from the entire congress and by the waving of handkerchiefs and hats from the English delegates', according to the Minutes, won him a lasting reputation in the International.[13] The Swedish delegation was led by Hjalmar Branting, the Dutch by P. J. Troelstra and W. H. Vliegen, the Belgians by Louis Bertrand and Émile Vandervelde, the Spanish by Pablo Iglesias and Antonio G. Quejido, General Secretary of the Spanish trade-union movement, and the Swiss by Karl Bürkli and Hermann Greulich. The German delegation of forty-eight was led by Bebel, Liebknecht and Paul Singer, the Austrians by Victor Adler and Karl Kaustky (the latter had a mandate from the Austrian party). The Italians included Constantino Lazzari, Enrico Ferri and Alessandro Schiavi; the Russian Social Democratic party was represented by George Valentinovich Plekhanov, Paul Axelrod and Vera Zasulich; the thirteen members of the Polish delegation included Felix Daszynski, Josef Pilsudski and Rosa Luxemburg.
Among the Anarchists who came with mandates from trade unions and other bona fide Labour organizations there were several leading figures in the movement, including Domela Nieuwenhuis, Errico Malatesta, who led the Italian Anarchists, Louis Michel, the famous Communard who had fought on the barricades in 1871, served nine years in the penal settlement of New Caledonia and been sentenced to a further six years' hard labour on her return to France, and Gustav Landauer, a major essayist, mystic and visionary who was destined for a martyr's death—a member of the Bavarian Soviet government of 1919. Landauer, like Rosa Luxemburg, was murdered by German army officers.
The London Congress met in the impressive surroundings of the Queen's Hall, and was preceded on the previous day by a mass meeting in Hyde Park, with tens of thousands of workers in attendance. As soon as the congress had been formally opened with the speeches of fraternal greetings, the delegate of the Dutch Anarchist Socialist League, C. Cornelissen, demanded the reopening of the debate on the Zurich resolution. Seeing the chairman's hesitation, the Anarchists began a violent uproar in the hall and galleries, and the session had to be adjourned. The Congress Steering Committee met at once and decided, in order toa void giving the impression of steam-rollering any section of the congress, to debate the Zurich resolution all over again.
The discussion was opened by Keir Hardie with an appeal for tolerance. He was followed by Tom Mann, pleading that 'no one should be pushed aside because of his opinions'. Then Jaurès and Hyndman spoke in favour of the resolution. Nieuwenhuis, on the other hand, declared that if it were passed all freedom of thought inside the International would disappear. The Anarchists, he insisted, were every bit as good Socialists as the Social Democrats, and their exclusion from congresses would be motivated only by the fear of 'disturbing the fathers of the Marxist church council'. When put to the vote, the resolution as supported by Germany, a majority of the British (223 against 104), Belgium, U.S.A., Australia, Switzerland, Romania, Bulgaria, Russia, Poland, Austria, Bohemia, Hungary, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Spain and Portugal. Voting against the resolution were a majority of the French (57 to 56) and of the Dutch (9 to 5) delegates. The Italian delegation, being equally divided, abstained.
The fact that nearly a third of the British delegates voted against the resolution in no way indicated any sympathy for Anarchism. It merely expressed the traditional English tolerance of (or indifference to) ideological diversity. But the voting did reveal the strength of the Anarchist influence on the Dutch and Italian working class and on the French trade unions. The same influence was displayed in the debate on a resolution drafted by one of the congress commissions and moved by George Lansbury. This sought to define once again what was meant by 'political action'. It said that 'by political action this congress understands all forms of organized struggle for the capture of political power and use of the legislative and administrative institutions of State and community by the working class, in the interests of its emancipation'.
Joseph Tortelier opposed, on behalf of the French trade unions. He claimed that parliamentarism was widely discredited among the French people, that the workers had nothing to hope for from any parliament and that they could fight effectively for their emancipation only by means of 'direct action'. By direct action Tortelier meant principally the strike weapon, but it could also take other forms—private property in housing, for example, could be ended at once if tenants refuse to pay their rent. Jaurès replied with a powerful appeal to the workers to struggle for political power. He described the strike as a method of 'fighting capitalism with folded arms'. Political action was by far the strongest weapon open to the working class, and the most dangerous enemies were those who advised against using this weapon. Bebel then described how, through participating in political activity, including elections, German Social Democracy had advanced from being a small, persecuted and derided sect without prestige or support to being the strongest party in the Reich. 'Ten years ago,' he declared, 'we received less than a hundred thousand votes, while at the last elections the figure was one and three quarter million—a quarter of the total cast. Every economic and political gain secured by the working class in Germany has been due to the activity and pressure of Social Democracy.' Once again the resolution was passed almost unanimously; the Dutch Anarchist delegates had left the congress before the opening of the debate, and there was only a small handful among the French delegates to cast their votes against the resolution.
The congress then decided to settle once and for all the question of Anarchist participation by formally suspending them from membership of the International. With the exception of the French syndicalist delegation everyone voted for a resolution declaring that 'the exclusive right' to attend future congresses should be limited firstly to those organizations 'which stand for the replacement of the capitalist system of property and production by Socialism, and who acknowledge the necessity of participating in legislative and parliamentary activity as a means of achieving this', and, in addition, to 'all trade-union organizations which, without themselves taking part in politics, acknowledge the need for political and parliamentary activity'. The resolution made its point even more explicit by adding, 'Anarchists are hereby excluded.'
As reporter for the commission which had been considering the resolution, Liebknecht explained that Congress felt obliged to take this step because 'we should like to hold our next congress free from the unpleasant scenes which have marred the last two'. The Anarchists had not been satisfied to state their views and then conform with majority decisions, but had persistently tried to sabotage the work of Congress. 'We were therefore compelled to devote whole days to fruitless discussion with those whose only object was to discredit the congress.' The London resolution brought to an end, after nearly thirty years, the struggle between Anarchism and Social Democracy within the confines of a single international movement.
1. The Second International held its various congresses under a number of different names. The first, in Paris, was known as the 'International Labour Congress'; the Zurich Congress, in 1893, met under the title of the 'International Socialist Labour Congress', while the London Congress, in 1896, was called the 'International Socialist Workers' and Trade-Union Congress'. The title of 'International Socialist Congress' was adopted only at the Paris Congress of 1900 and subsequently.
2. Victor Adlers Aufsütze, Reden und Briefe, ed. Friedrich Adler (Vienna, 1923), vol. VII, p. 23.
3. Gustav Jaeckh, Die Internationale (Leipzig, 1904), p. 218.
4. The Spanish delegates, José Mesa and Pablo Iglesias, proposed that a central committee be established, but withdrew the suggestion when Vaillant declared that, in view of the widely differing legal conditions in the various countries, such a resolution would be unacceptable.
5. Friedrich Engels, 'Der 4 Mai in London', in Arbeiter-Zeitung, 23 May 1890; see Victor Adlers Aufsätze …, vol. I, p. 14.
6. Victor Adlers Aufsätze …, vol. I, p. 73, and vol. VI, p. 191.
7. See Ludwig Brügel, Geschichte der österreichischen Sozialdemokratie, vol. IV, p. 126. The Emperor William II was also determined, according to a letter from the Austro-Hungarian Foreign Minister, Count Kalnoky, to the Austrian Prime Minister, Count Taaffe, 'to act with the utmost vigour'. Count Kalnoky wrote: 'I consider the newspaper statement that Kaiser Wilhelm has spoken up for the workers in relation to the May demonstration to be a mischievous intervention. I hear, on the contrary, that he was most emphatic that, now so much had been done for the betterment of the workers' lot, he would "strike at random" the next time if a workers' movement jeopardized life and property, and that he has already given orders to that effect' (Brügel, op. cit., vol. VI, pp. 124–5).
8. Neue Freie Presse, 1 May 1890. The paper added: 'The Saint whose festival is being celebrated in all countries today is called Karl Marx.' It recognized correctly the real meaning of the May Day demonstration when it wrote: '… The 1 May sprung from the spirit of the late International.…Workers of all countries, unite! This was the call which Karl Marx once has raised, and the 1 May is its echo. Who will let himself be deceived by that demonstration for the eight-hour day! What really is meant is to test the solidarity of the workers.…The 1 May is an assault of the Socialist party which aims at the destruction of the present society, at the abolition of capital. …' Quoted in Brügel, op. cit., vol. IV, p. 126.
9. Victor Adlers Aufsätze …, vol. VI, p. 191.
10. See Hans Delbrück, Regierung und Volkswille (Berlin, 1914), pp. 61–4; also Preussische Jahrbücher, vols. 147 and 153; Egmont Zechlin, Staatsstreichpläne Bismarcks und Wilhelms II, 1890–4 (Stuttgart, 1929).
11. Protokoll (Zurich, 1893), p. 34. 'A Party,' Bebel wrote to Engels on 10 November 1892, defending his attitude, 'should not shed its blood for the sake of a demonstration.' Engels admitted in his reply that a general strke on May Day would have to be paid for with sacrifices in no relation to its gains, but he was afraid it makes 'a bad impression when the strongest party in the world is going to retreat, noblesse oblige …'. Bebel insisted, however, in his answer to Engels: '… We don't want to incur formidable sacrifices for a demonstration whose advantages for us are very small.…The power of state and the bourgeoisie would gladly accept our challenge, because they know they would be the victors [in that struggle] …' August Bebel: Briefwechsel mit Friedrich Engels, ed. Werner Blumenberg (The Hague, 1965), pp. 613, 618, 621. For the history of the conflict, see Mehring, Geschichte der deutschen Sozialdemokratie, op. cit., II:2, pp. 328ff.
12. See M. Dommanget, Histoire du premier moi (Paris, 1953).
13. Verhandlungen und Beschlüsse des Internationalen Sozialistischen Arbeiterund Gewerkschaftskongresses (Berlin, 1896), p. 19; our account is also based on the detailed published Report of Proceedings (London, 1896) published by the Organization Committee. For a biography of Jaurès, see Margaret Pease, Jean Jaurès (London, 1917).