The Socialist International was born on 28 September 1864. But the International Working Men's Association, the name by which it was first known, had predecessors whose ideas and traditions it embodied and carried farther. For a clear grasp of the spirit and history of the Socialist International we must take the story back to the first of those predecessors. We can find the origins of the First International in the great movement for freedom and democracy, comprising many peoples, inspired by the French Revolution in 1789. This movement was decidedly international in its character and was imbued with a feeling of international solidarity among the oppressed. It also brought about the first independent political movement of the working class in England and Scotland, while in France it gave rise to the first organization of militant Socialists.
The ideas which kindled the Revolution in France and, through its rays, lit up a movement for freedom in many lands, had developed much earlier in England where the middle classes had secured a measure of civic rights and political freedom. There, feudalism had disintegrated many centuries earlier. The rights of the people and their equality before the law were guaranteed by long-standing custom and by a constitutional enactment—the Habeas Corpus Act of 1679. Absolutism could not therefore develop as strongly as in France, Spain, the Habsburg Empire and the German Principalities. Finally, and most undramatically, the Glorious Revolution of 1688 had abolished absolutism in all it forms and divided power between king and Parliament.
At the time of the French Revolution, however, the power of the king was still very apparent, while Parliament was dominated by the aristocracy. England was an oligarchy, and democracy still an unrealized ideal, while the contrasts between wealth and poverty were sharper than ever. The French Revolution stimulated the aristocracy to challenge the predominance of the king, the middle classes to claim a share of parliamentary power and the workers to resist the terrible forms of wage-slavery arising out of the Industrial Revolution.
For the peoples of the Continent, however, the ideas of the French Revolution had a different and deeper significance. They were still subjected to a system of domination which rested on a complete denial of the principles of freedom and equality. In these countries the principle that all authority stems from Divine Right was still undisputed. According to this theory, the king had been called to his throne by the grace of God, and all power therefore resided in the Crown; the nobility and the bishops, through ancient custom, were entitled to share the wealth of the nation with the king; the common people in town and country were his subjects. And as all rights came from the king, every right enjoyed by the people of town and country was a gift of royal grace. The idea that men had rights by virtue of their humanity was utterly alien to the way of thought of a feudal society.[1]
The Declaration of the Rights of Man by the French Constituent Assembly therefore challenged in all these countries the moral, ideological and legal bases on which depended the social status, political power and economic position of king, aristocracy and church. It overthrew the principle of Divine Right, replacing it with the idea of a 'natural right' inherent in human nature and revealed by eternal reason. It proclaimed the 'sacred rights of men'. It declared, 'Men are born, and always continue, free and equal. d the claim that kings derived their sovereignty from the grace of God and declared the people collectively to be sovereign—the source of all power in state and society.[2] It proclaimed the commonwealth, founded on the people's will, to be the natural constitution for society in France as well as in the rest of the world.
These ideas were not new. They were developed by philosophers and glorified by poets during the period of the Enlightenment. But now for the first time in the history of Europe they were proclaimed in the basic constitutional document of a state—a state, moreover, in the foremost position which France occupied, among the great powers at the time. To thinkers and poets it seemed that a wonderful dream was about to come true, that the reign of reason was just beginning and that the Revolution had opened the doors of a new era, an era in which states and societies would be moulded in the spirit of the Enlightenment, an era in which men would live in brotherhood and perpetual peace. All who wanted an end to repression—political, social and intellectual—identified themselves fully with the revolution. Kant, Fichte, Hegel, Schiller, Herder, Wieland and Hölderlin in Germany, Blake, Burns, Coleridge, Southey and Wordsworth in England, greeted the Revolution with exuberance as a triumph of reason, justice and social equality, as a creative force raising a world of freedom and equality out of the chaos of tyranny and superstition.
My brethren, these are truths, and mighty ones:
Ye all are equal; nature made ye so.
Equality is your birthright,
cried Southey,[3] and Klopstock wished he had a hundred voices to proclaim the birth of liberty. Many years later, Hegel described how deeply the Revolution had moved him as a young man. 'It was a brilliant sunrise. Every thinking being celebrated the event. It was a time for noble endeavour. The world was full of spiritual joy, as if the spirit of God had now become a reality in the world.' And even Goethe, although he viewed with tranquil scepticism the process of the Revolution, avowed, deeply moved:
Who will dare to deny that his heart was exalted within him,
And that his spirit, enfranchised, throbbed with a purer devotion
When he beheld the first and the radiant glory of morning,
Heard of the rights of man to be shared in common with all men.
Learned of fair liberty, learned of equality, greatest of values.[4]
But the message of Liberty and Equality, the freshly awakened hope among the oppressed that a new era was approaching, naturally appeared to the ruling class as the grossest possible provocation. Driven by its own inner logic, the Revolution had gradually embodied its original principles in the enactments of the French constitution. It had abolished all privileges of birth and status, destroyed the nobility and the secular power of the church, deprived the king of his power, and finally overthrown the monarchy. This upheaval took place in the country with the oldest dynasty, a great power at that time foremost among the European states. The example France gave in raising the banner of popular sovereignty threatened every European dynasty, the entire European aristocracy and the power of the Church.
The revolution was the common enemy of princes, nobility and clergy, and they decided to stamp it out by force. Pope Pius IV had, in the spring of 1791, formally condemned the principles of the Revolution, opposing the doctrines of the Church of Rome to the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen. The émigrés publicly, and Louis XVI secretly, implored the crowned heads of Europe to defend their own cause. Armed intervention was considered in the Cabinets of Vienna, St Petersburg and Berlin, and after Louis XVI, having failed to escape, had been removed from the throne, they were implemented. In the summer of 1792, the coalition armies of Austria, Prussia and the German princes, to which corps of fleeing French aristocrats and officers had attached themselves, approached the borders of France. With a manifesto in the name of the Emperor of Germany and the King of Prussia, the Duke of Brunswick, commander of the allied armies, demanded the immediate restoration of the old regime. If Paris refused and resisted, he threatened her with 'a vengeance which would never be forgotten; she would be razed to the ground.
Through the war of the allied princes of Europe against revolutionary France, the Revolution became the concern of all those, in many countries, who felt themselves victims of absolute governments. In its victory they saw the triumph of freedom in their own lands, in its defeat the dreaded end of their hopes. Thus in a good many countries the French Revolution split the nation sharply in two.
The international action of kings and princes, the war of the European coalition against France—blessed by the church and supported by the conservative wing of the middle class—brought into being a democratic International. A section of the middle class, a few aristocrats, but a large number of workers and artisans in a variety of organizations corresponded with fraternal organizations across national boundaries and with the revolutionary clubs in France. They saw Paris, the heart of the Revolution, as the centre of an international society fighting for freedom.
During those strenuous days, were not the eyes of all nations
Turned to the spot that so long had been the world's capital city,
Now, more than ever before, deserving that glorious title?
Did not mankind wax strong in courage, in spirit, in utterance?
Were not the names of those men who first spread abroad the good tidings
Equal in fame to the loftiest heroes among the mortals?
Thus Goethe, and his lines reflected the prevailing atmosphere of the time. And even in 1799, when in France itself reaction had already set in and the revolutionary wars of liberation had degenerated into imperialist wars of conquest, Fichte still saw France as 'the fatherland of the upright man', since, he declared, 'the most precious aspirations of mankind' were bound up with her fate.
In France itself, Girondists as well as Jacobins were genuinely convinced that they were the pioneers of freedom not only for the people of France but for the whole of mankind. When the Constituent Assembly debated the draft Declaration of the Rights of Man, speaker after speaker referred to the universal character of the rights and claimed that they were valid for the peoples of all countries.[5]
They felt themselves linked, in common struggle, with the oppressed of all nations. They spoke of the brotherhood of peoples and demonstrated, symbolically, the idea of international solidarity. Thus Lafayette handed the key of the Bastille—symbol of the vanquished despotism—to Thomas Paine, hero of the American War of Independence, and the French National Assembly ordered mourning on the death of Benjamin Franklin. In this spirit the National Assembly conferred French citizenship on men of eminence in many a country—Washington, Wilberforce, Schiller, Klopstock, Pestalozzi and Paine among others—'because they paved the way for the liberation of mankind'. It was explained, in the decree granting citizenship, that although the French National Assembly could not hope to see as yet 'men establish by law what exists in nature, a single family, a single society, nevertheless the friends of freedom must be dear to a nation which has renounced all conquests and proclaimed its desire for the brotherhood of nations'. This was especially true at a time 'when a National Convention decides the fate of France and perhaps prepares the future for mankind'.[6]
The princes had joined forces in a war against revolutionary France; the French National Convention called on the peoples to join the revolution against princes. In the Convention, Robespierre moved that the constitutional law then under debate should declare France's complete solidarity with the revolutionaries of all lands. It should state, he proposed, that 'the men of all countries are brothers, and the various peoples should help each other, according to their strength, as citizens of one and the same country. The oppressor of one single nation declares himself the enemy of all nations.' A more moderate version of Robespierre's idea was adopted by the Convention in the Constitution of 1793, Article 118, which said that 'the French people is the friend and the natural ally of all free peoples'.
In the life-and-death struggle in which France was engaged, she decided to carry the Revolution into the enemy camp. Soon after the outbreak of the war against the coalition, the Council of Paris—the real leadership of the Revolution—decided to ask the National Assembly to declare: 'The nation renounces all plans of conquest, but it does not renounce the help of neighbouring states which wisht o extricate themselves from slavery.'[7] When a year later the French revolutionary armies invaded the territory of the coalition powers, Danton proposed to the Convention that the armed forces of France be appointed instruments of the Revolution. 'For as long as we are surrounded by tyrants,' he said, 'their coalition can endanger our own freedom.' He further asserted that: 'In sending us here the French nation has at the same time created a grand council to head the uprising of the peoples against all the kings of the world.'[8]
The idea of France's armed solidarity with revolutionaries abroad was later embodied in the following decree by the Convention on 19 November 1793: 'In the name of the French nation, the National Convention declares that it will grant fraternal protection to all peoples trying to win back their freedom. It gives authority to issue to the generals the necessary orders instructing them to help those peoples and to protect those citizens who are, or are likely to be, oppressed because of their love of freedom.' Cambon, the Convention's Finance Minister, and one of the Girondist leaders, was asked to submit a draft of the procedure laid down for generals in the occupied territories.
The decree, put before the Convention by Cambon and adopted on 15 December 1793, said basically that the aim of the revolutionary war was the abolition of privilege. 'All privilege and all tyranny must be regarded as our enemy.' In the occupied territories, where the people did not themselves overthrow the feudal system, France must declare herself a revolutionary power and destroy the old régime. The French generals were instructed to abolish immediately tithes and all other forms of feudal dues as well as every kind of manorial right. All the old authorities were to be dissolved and replaced by elected provisional administrations, but only those citizens were to vote who undertook to maintain freedom and equality and forfeit all privileges. The generals were also to abolish the existing system of taxes and confiscate as security for the assignats all the property of the Exchequer, the princes and of secular and religious institutions. Should the elected administration be forced to levy taxes, it must take care that the burden did not fall on the working class.[9]
Many political refugees from abroad found asylum in revolutionary France. The clubs opened their doors to them, they secured posts in the National Guard and in the central and local administrations and were even elected as representatives of the people: Thomas Paine and the Prussian revolutionary, Anarcharsis Cloots, were members of the Convention. After the declaration of war they formed the Foreign Legion, which was given the task, after the war, of freeing their countries from feudalism and despotism. There was a Belgian legion in the northern army, a legion from Liège in the army of the centre, a legion of Allobrogen, made up of men from Savoy, Geneva, Neuenberg and Waadtländ, and a Batavian and a German legion under the command of Colonel Dambach, who had served under Frederick II. The foreign legion played a major part in the decisive victory at Valmy in September 1792, which forced the Duke of Brunswick to retreat, and in the victory at Jemappes a month later, which destroyed the power of Austria over Belgium.
In some countries, the French revolutionary armies were received as liberators. 'The advance of my army [in Savoy],' reported General Montesquiou to the convention, 'is a triumphal procession. In country and town, people rush to welcome us; everywhere they are wearing the tri-coloured cockades.' The country was full of revolutionary clubs, inspired, as they stated in their resolutions, to 'throw themselves into the arms of the French Republic and form, with it, a single nation of brothers'. A National Assembly of Allobrogen, with members sent from all the municipalities, deposed the King of Sardinia, overthrew the aristocracy and the rule of the landlords, confiscated the property of the clergy and declared its wish to be united with France.
Not everywhere in Europe did the population respond so vigorously to the Revolution. But in several towns in the German states, in Switzerland, northern Italy and even in Hungary, friends of the Revolution formed themselves into secret societies, clubs and study circled, into 'nests of democracy' as they were described in the German counterrevolutionary press. Speeches by the leaders of the French Revolution, reports of the Convention's activity, revolutionary periodicals, almanacs, proclamations and songs of freedom were distributed, despite a strict censorship and treats of severe punishment. The Decree on Riots of the government of Saxony in 1791 threatened 'leaders and ringleaders…who incite others to form an association…and who produce or distribute seditious literature' with death by the sword and, when circumstances aggravated the crime, on the wheel.[10]
In some districts invaded by French troops, the tree of liberty, symbol of the Revolution, was widely planted, and the old régime was overthrown in Belgium, the principality of Lüttich, the diocese of Basle, Worms, and also in Mainz, which declared itself a republic. In some secular and clerical estates on the left bank of the Rhine, the peasants refused to pay tithes, contribute forced labour or recognize other feudal rights.[11] In Saxony the peasants rose in 1790, in Silesia they rose, together with the weavers and artisans, in 1792 and 1793, while in Breslau there was a rising of merchants and handicraftsmen in April 1794. The revolutionary ferment, which had begun in France, spread over the whole of western and central Europe. But this ferment was unable to crystallize into mass revolutionary movements in countries still industrially undeveloped, because the social forces capable of bringing about a revolution in society were still in their infancy.
The French Revolution was the work of a strong, self-conscious bourgeoisie which was no longer prepared to tolerate its position as the Third Estate and which claimed to be the most important class in state and society. It was also in revolt against the aristocratic structure of society, which had become a fetter on economic development; and it found support from a massive industrial proletariat in the suburbs of Paris, Lyon and Marseille which looked to the Revolution for the fulfilment of its hopes and endeavours.[12]
Among France's neighbours, however, there was, except in Belgium, no strong industrial and commercial middle class and no industrial proletariat. Italy and Spain were impoverished and exhausted. The German states, at the time of the French Revolution, were still agrarian with a few industrial enclaves, such as the weaving districts of Silesia and the medieval homesteads of the handicraft cutlers of Remscheid and Söllingen. Only a few German towns had recovered from the devastation and depopulation of the Thirty Years War. At the end of the eighteenth century, the population of Paris alone was greater than the total population of all the German free cities, including the university towns. The French Revolution, as we have seen, produced a powerful echo in Germany. But the social forces which could have transformed the radical, democratic and cosmopolitan tendencies of the intellectuals and artisans into a revolutionary political movement were absent.
1. The idea of Divine Right was most explicitly defined by James I in a speech to the English Parliament in 1609. 'Kings are justly called gods,' he told the assembled Parliament, 'for they exercise a manner of resemblance of divine power upon earth. For if you will consider the attributes of God, you shall see how they agree in the person of a king. God hath power to create or destroy, make or unmake at His pleasure, to give life or send death, to judge all and to be accountable to none. And the like power have kings. They make and unmake their subjects; they have power of raising up and casting down; of life and death; judges over all their subjects and in all cases, yet accountable to none but God'—G. P. Gooch, Political Thought in England from Bacon to Halifax (London, 1914), pp. 14–15. Frederick William IV of Prussia had the same idea a good half-century after the French National Assembly had proclaimed the sovereignty of the people in 1789. In a letter to Von Schön, President of East Prussia, he said in 1914: 'I feel myself entirely a creature of God's grace.…Believe me on my word as a king: while I reign, no prince or farmhand, parliament or Jewish school will take over anything which belongs—rightly or wrongly—to the Crown, without my assent.…A German prince should rule his regiment of subjects like a father, and since it is my birthright to reign over my father's domain…I fully intend to guide my immature children, chastise the backsliders but let the good and worthy take part in administering my estate'—H. von Treitschke, Deutsche Geschichte im 19 Jahrhundert (Leipzig, 1879–94), vol. IV, p. 57.
2. 'Sovereignty resides in the people. It is indivisible, illimitable and unchangeable'—Article 25 of the Constitution of 1793.
3. Robert Southey, Wat Tyler, Act III.
4. Goethe, Hermann und Dorothea (Klio, Das Zeitalter).
5. Eric Thompson, Popular Sovereignty and the French Constituent Assembly, 1789–91 (Manchester, 1952), p. 135.
6. A. Aulard, Politische Geschichte der Französischen Revolution (Munich/Leipzig, 1924), vol. I, p. 207.
7. Aulard, op. cit., vol. I, p. 396.
8. Albert Mathiez, Die französische Revolution (Zurich, 1950), vol. I, p. 386.
9. Mathiez, op. cit., vol. I, p. 396.
10. Hedwig Voegt, Die deutsche jakobinische Literatur und Publizistik, 1789–1800 (Berlin, 1955), p. 134.
11. See Georges Lefebvre, The French Revolution, vol. I (London, 1962), pp. 184–5.
12. Lefebvre, op. cit., pp. 108, 118–20.