In spite of its short life, the First International constituted one of the most memorable episodes in the history of Socialism. Its effective existence, from its foundation in 1864 to the Hague Congress in 1872, was a mere eight years. Its membership was inconsiderable and its financial resources almost unbelievably scanty. Yet it succeeded in making a permanent impression on the life of its time. To millions of workers it seemed a legendary power on which they placed boundless hopes. The leading organ of the English middle class compared it to the early Christian church. Governments saw in it a gigantic, menacing, mysterious power. European Cabinets concocted plans for its extermination. In France and Spain it was persecuted under special laws. In the Austro-Hungarian monarchy and in the German Empire it was outlawed as a danger to the state. The Pope condemned it as the 'enemy of God and man'. With the First International, both revered and abused, Socialism stepped on to the stage of history as a world movement.
Its founders however had no conception of the historical importance which their project was to attain. The initiative came not from Marx, as reported by legend, but from the working-class leaders in England and France.[1]
We have already seen how from 1789 the English workers responded to revolutions and struggles for freedom abroad. The tradition of international solidarity among the oppressed, which Thomas Paine had implanted in their thoughts and feelings, was continually revived whenever the occasion called for acts of solidarity.
Chartism had embodied this spirit since the 1830s. When soon after 1856 the Chartist movement collapsed, the slowly emerging trade-union movement took over the tradition. Italy's fight for freedom evoked the powerful sympathy of the English workers. When Palmerston, using the pretext of Orsini's attempt to assassinate Napoleon III on 14 January 1858, introduced his Conspiracy Bill directed against political refugees, he was deterred by stormy demonstrations. English workers protested strongly against the Treaty of Villafranca (11 July 1859) by which Napoleon sought to establish a confederation, under the honorary chairmanship of the Pope, as an alternative to a united Italy. They followed with enthusiasm every stage of Garibaldi's 'Expedition of the Thousand' in Sicily in 1860. Together with that of the Radicals, their pressure compelled the British government to veto Napoleon's plan for armed intervention against Garibaldi. When Garibaldi arrived in England as a refugee in April 1864, he was given a royal welcome, and when a few weeks later the government forced him to leave the country, a stormy demonstration of London workers ended in clashes with the police. All these activities were organized and led by prominent trade unionists such as Odger, Cremer and Howell.
The reaction of the English working-class movement during the American Civil War (1861–5) was of a quite exceptional nobility. The struggle on the other side of the Atlantic had a disastrous effect on the British economy. Textiles, the key factor of Britain's economic life, depended on raw cotton from the Negro plantations of the Southern States. Blockade by the Northern States, however, prevented cotton from leaving the ports. Almost three fifths of the spindles and looms in Lancashire were stopped and tens of thousands of workers became unemployed. Paralysis spread from the cotton industry to the whole economic life of the country. A section of the middle class, seriously hit by the crisis, called on the government to break the blockade by armed intervention against the Northern States. The demand was supported by the upper classes who identified themselves, naturally, with the outlook and way of life of the southern aristocracy.
Among the workers, however, despite the terrible sacrifices imposed on them by the war, there was a strong feeling of solidarity with the Negro slaves. When the British government seemed to threaten war on the side of the slave-owners, there was considerable resistance from the working-class movement, particularly after Lincoln's Proclamation emancipating the slaves. The textile areas of Lancashire were the hardest hit, yet mass meetings in Manchester as well as London warned the government against armed intervention and declared in addresses to the President, Abraham Lincoln, their sympathy with his fight for Negro emancipation. Lincoln, who replied to every one of the addresses, was especially moved by the one from Manchester. 'I know and deeply regret,' he wrote, 'the sufferings which the workers of Manchester are undergoing in this crisis.…Under these circumstances their conduct is an exalted example of Christian heroism, which has not been surpassed in any country in any epoch.' Marx also recalled, in the Inaugural Address which he wrote for the International after its foundation in September 1864, this episode in the history of international working-class solidarity. 'It was not the wisdom of the ruling classes,' he declared, 'but the heroic resistance to their criminal folly by the working classes of England that saved the West of Europe from plunging headlong into an infamous crusade for the perpetuation and propagation of slavery on the other side of the Atlantic.' In the north of England the veteran Chartist, Ernest Jones, was in the forefront of the movement. In London, the lead was taken by the trade-union leaders, Odger, Cremer and Howell, who were to help found the International, and Applegarth, who became one of its strongest supporters. It was another issue among the different nations, however, which provided the occasion for a renewed attempt at establishing a working-class international.
At the end of January 1863 the Polish people had risen for the third time since 1830 in armed revolt against Russian domination, and had installed a provisional government. It had taken a strong military force, sent by the Tsar's government, over a year of pitiless campaigning before the revolt was crushed. European democrats, particularly in France and England, had a traditional sympathy with the cause of the Polish revolution. In 1848 French workers had called on their government to declare war on Russia, in order to free Poland from the hated tyranny of the Tsar.
The new revolution in 1863 reawakened old sympathies in France and England. In the France of Louis Bonaparte, where all independent working-class initiative was suppressed by the police, such sympathy could not express itself in action. But in England a mass meeting was called by trade-union leaders, to demonstrate their solidarity with the Polish revolution. In the chair was Professor Edward Spencer Beesly, who was also to act as chairman at the foundation meeting of the International. The meeting elected a delegation to demand armed intervention by the British government in support of Poland. When the Prime Minister, Lord Palmerston, removed the delegation, he declared that without the support of France it was unthinkable that Britain should intervene. After this the union leaders decided on a further meeting, this time with the participation of French working-class delegates, to increase pressure on the government.
Links between the British trade-union leaders and delegates of the French workers had been established at the International Exhibition in London in 1862. The election of a delegation to attend the exhibition was one of the few positive achievements of the French working class under the Second Empire. Napoleon's police state allowed few expressions of independent activity. The formation of trade unions was a punishable offence, there was no right of public assembly and the Press was gagged.
At the same time, Napoleon had tried to reconcile the workers to his coup d'état by improving their standard of living. He created industrial councils, subsidized working-class welfare institutions, tolerated mutual-benefit societies, kept down the price of bread and undertook public works on a spectacular scale. This Caesarean policy—a kind of 'imperial Socialism'—was reasonably successful in the economic environment of the 1850s. Most French workers accepted both the prosperity and the régime.
Caesarean illusions were shattered by the economic crisis of 1857–8. Wages fell, and an outbreak of strikes took place in defiance of the law against combination. Working-class unrest forced new concessions from the government. Among these concessions was the right to elect a workers' delegation to the London International Exhibition. Everyone who could prove himself a bona fide worker through the possession of a work book was entitled to vote and elected workers' commissions were set up to organize and supervise the voting. In these elections the French workers could act independently for the first time since the coup d'état. In Paris alone almost 200,000 voted in the election of 200 delegates; in the provinces and the other towns a further 550 delegates were chosen. To meet the cost of the delegation, the Imperial Exhibition Commission and the Paris Town Council each contributed 20,000 francs; in the workshops another 13,000 francs were raised in voluntary collections. Delegates received an average sum of 200 francs per head.
Although the delegation was genuinely representative of the French working class and had been properly elected, the English trade-union leaders felt no enthusiasm for a group of men who seemed to them to be enjoying the patronage of Napoleon. The French emperor, who was cordially loathed by the working class of England, seemed to be using the delegation as an instrument of policy. It would have seemed natural for the French visitors to be invited by the London Trades Council to share in its celebrations. In fact the only invitation they received came from a committee representing a group of co-operative societies, middle-class politicians and industrialists. The delegation also received a letter of welcome from Lord Palmerston.
Indirectly, however, the visit of the French workers' delegation had significance for the early history of the International. While in London, a group under the leadership of Henri Tolain made contact with English trade-union leaders. In this way the first personal relationship was established between representatives of the English and French working classes. It was through Tolain and his group therefore that an invitation was sent for French workers to attend a second meeting in London in support of the Polish revolution.
Henri-Louis Tolain (1828–97) was at that time the most influential working-class leader in France. He had proposed the election of a delegation to represent the workers of France and together with the president of the Exhibition Commission, Prince Victor Napoleon, a cousin of the Emperor, had forced it through against the resistance of the Paris chief of police. Tolain was in no way an instrument of 'Caesarism'. He was a Republican and, as a convinced Proudhonist, an opponent of Communism and of the 'direct action' against the political régime which was then being advocated by small groups of Blanquists. He thought it possible, by persistent education of the workers, to secure democratic institutions from the régime peacefully and constitutionally, and to overcome the evils of capitalism through the spread of co-operative societies. He was opposed to those workers who placed their main emphasis on political reform. Soon after returning from London, he broke with the bourgeois members of the Commission and became leader of an independent working-class group which, though tolerated by the government, soon freed itself from any suggestion of state sponsorship. In the Paris elections of March 1863, Tolain represented this group as a working-class candidate independent of, and in opposition to, the government.
Tolain accepted the invitation from the English trade-union leaders. He appeared together with some of his Paris comrades at a meeting in support of the Polish revolution, in London, on 22 July 1863. The speakers again included both Odger and Cremer. Tolain also spoke, introducing himself as a 'delegate of the Paris workers'.
On the day following the meeting, the London Trades Council invited the French delegation to a reception. While speeches of welcome were being exchanged, reference was made to the need for closer unity among the workers of all nations. An English committee was formed and instructed to draft an address to the French workers which should include the idea of an international association of the working class. The meeting of 23 July, therefore, took the decisive step in establishing the historic International. This was made explicit by Odger in drafting the address.
George Odger (1820–77), a shoemaker by trade, was then Secretary of the London Trades Council, to which a number of independent trade unions were affiliated. It had grown directly out of a tremendous struggle by the English building workers for a nine-hour day. This had started with a strike by employees of some of the larger building contractors. The masters replied with a general lock-out and announced that in future they would employ only workers who signed a 'document' renouncing trade-union membership. In this way, the fight which had begun over the shortening of the working day developed into a struggle for a fundamental trade-union principle. The strike lasted for more than six months—from July 1859 to February 1860—and roused the entire working class. The building workers appealed to their comrades in other trades for solidarity, and had a resounding response. Nearly £15,000 was collected in London alone, and over £8,000 came in from 240 provincial centres—sums which evoked surprise among members of the middle class. A committee representing the building workers and members of other unions was formed to organize support and explain to the general public, in a series of mass meetings, the reasons for the strike. Among its most active members were Odger, later president of the International, and W. R. Cremer, its future secretary. Cremer, himself a carpenter, spoke at more than a hundred of these meetings.
The strike ended with a compromise. The contractors withdrew the 'document', thus recognizing the right of the workers to joint trade unions. The unions, for their part, ceased their campaign for a nine-hour day.
Despite its equivocal results, the struggle became a turning-point in the history of the British Labour movement. Not only did it give new and powerful impetus to the idea of workers' solidarity; it also gave rise to a new kind of working-class organization. Local committees of trade unionists had been formed to organize collections of money in the workshops. In a number of industrial towns as well as in London these committees developed into the bodies known as trades councils. They soon became important centres of working-class organization, and it was not long before the London Trades Council, founded in July 1860, had won a commanding position in the Labour movement. Its first secretary was George Howell, later a member of the General Council of the International. George Odger succeeded him in 1862.
The address which Odger drafted, 'To the Workmen of France from the Working men of England',[2] echoed those earlier appeals to international working-class solidarity which had gone out since the 1840s from George Harney, Ernest Jones, the Fraternal Democrats and their successors. Once again the workers were reminded that the mighty ones of the earth held their own international conferences at which 'successful crimes are justified, and unscrupulous ministers legalize them', while those who fought for national freedom and popular rights met with imprisonment or exile. Such abuse of power could be ended only through international brotherhood. 'Let there be a gathering-together of representatives from France, Italy, Germany, Poland, England and all countries where there exists a will to co-operate for the good of mankind,' the address continued. 'Let us have our congresses; let us discuss the great questions on which the peace of nations depends.'
The address then turned to a very concrete social problem. British employers, it pointed out, had often tried to force down wages by bringing over to Britain lower-paid workers from Belgium, France and Germany. The address was insistent that this had been done 'not from any desire on the part of our continental brothers to injure us, but through a want of regular and systematic communication between the industrious classes of all countries'. Their object must be to raise the general level of wages and to prevent it from being reduced through the playing-off of low-paid against higher-paid workers. This required, above all, international working-class co-operation.
Finally the address called for immediate action in defence of Polish freedom. It proposed a campaign to collect signatures to a petition, launched simultaneously in France and Britain, which would be handed at the same time to the governments of both countries. The petition would demand the granting of belligerent rights to Poland as a nation engaged in a revolutionary war of independent against Russia. 'We must do this,' the address concluded, 'to prevent the intrigues of secret diplomacy (that scourge of nations), by which the devil's tragedy would be played over again—Poland's noblest sons be murdered, her daughters become the prey of a brutal soldiery, making that fair land once more a huge slaughterhouse, to the everlasting shame and disgrace of the civilized world.'
Three months were to pass, however, before the British address was dispatched, and a further eight months before the French reply was received in London. Meanwhile, the Polish revolution had been defeated.
The meeting which was called to hear the exchange of addresses, and at which the historic International was actually founded, met on 28 September 1864 at St Martin's Hall, London. The large meeting-hall was, as Marx reported a few weeks later in a letter to Engels, 'packed to suffocation'.[3] The working-class paper, the Beehive, had given the meeting excellent publicity in the London trade-union movement. There were also strong contingents of French, Italian, Swiss and Polish workers in attendance, together with many members of the German Communist Workers' Educational Society. The Paris workers were represented by Henri-Louis Tolain; Charles Limousin, a maker of pillow lace; and Parrachon, a bronze worker. In Paris workshops a subscription of 25 centimes a head had been raised to meet the expenses of the delegation.
Karl Marx had been 'respectfully requested' in a letter from W. R. Cremer to attend the meeting. He had taken no part in the preliminary discussions or in any of the preparations.[4] He had however been notified a few days earlier by his old friend George Eccarius, a German tailor, active in the British trade-union movement and in close touch with Odger about the purposes of the rally. Marx had some reputation, both in London refugee circles and among a section of the former Chartists, as a Socialist scholar and writer. His invitation to the meeting was therefore perfectly natural, although as he told Engels in a letter a few weeks later, he was content to act as a 'mute figure on the platform'.
There was nothing in the nature or the conduct of the meeting, or in the resolutions which it passed, to indicate the birth of a movement of historic significance. After a short opening speech by the chairman, Professor Edward Spencer Beesly, Odger read out the address of the English to the French workers, which, as we have seen, contained the suggestion of an international association.
In the reply from the French workers, read by Tolain on behalf of his delegation (Le Lubez read the English translation), this suggestion was taken up. 'Henceforward,' it declared, 'the people's voice must make itself heard on all the great political and social questions, thus letting the despots know that the end of their tyrannical tutelage has arrived.' The address appealed to the 'workers of all countries who wish to be free' to combine in an international association. It went on to emphasize that 'by the division of labour, the workman is no more than a mechanical agent', and to warn that 'without the solidarity of labourers' this would 'engender industrial serfdom, more implacable and more fatal to humanity than that destroyed by our fathers in those great days of the French Revolution'. The address concluded with a 'cry of alarm'. We, labourers of all countries, must unite to oppose an impassable barrier to a deadly system which would divide humanity into two classes—an ignorant, common people, and plethoric and big-bellied mandarins. Let us save ourselves through solidarity!'
The 'plan of organization' prepared in Paris by the French delegation and read out by Le Lubez, contained no reference to the ambitious social objectives and tasks for the future international association which both addresses had indicated in such high-flown phrases. Its structure was to be modelled on the earlier international organizations. A central commission was to be elected by representatives of the affiliated national groups. It would sit in London and appoint sub-commissions in all the European capitals with which it would correspond. The 'plan' allotted only one task to the central commission: it was to submit questions of interest to workers to the national sub-commissions for consideration and discussion, and then to publish the results of the discussions in several languages. The French 'plan' also proposed, in the course of the following year, to hold the first international working men's congress in Belgium.
These proposals were summarized in a resolution formally moved by the English trade unionists George William Wheeler and William Dell. In the debate which followed, Eccarius spoke on behalf of the German Workers' Educational Society. Other speakers included Major Luigi Wolff, an adjutant of Garibaldi and later Mazzini's secretary, the Frenchman Bosquet and the Irishman Forbes.
The resolution moved by Wheeler, which called the International into existence, declared 'that this meeting having heard the reply of our French brothers to our address, we once more bird them welcome, and as their programme is calculated to benefit the labour community, accept it as the basis of an international association; and hereby appoint a committee, with power to add to its number, to draw up the rules and regulations for such an association'. The meeting went on to elect a provisional central committee of thirty-two members representing English, French, Italian, Polish and German workers' organizations, and including Odger, Cremer, Howell and, as German representatives, Eccarius and Marx.
So ended the historic meeting, which opened and closed to the strains of music from a German workers' choir. It differed neither in spirit nor in the resolutions which it passed from previous would-be international working-class associations. Sine 1789 workers had been aware of a common bond of oppression, and their feelings of solidarity had been voiced at just such meetings on innumerable occasions. Since 1837 attempts had been made to organize an 'International of the oppressed', the 'oppressed' consisting of nations subjected to feudal absolutist regimes, of peoples suffering under foreign rule, and of workers, petite bourgeoisie and peasant, economically exploited by capitalism.
But the experience of all the political, social and national revolutions since 1789 had shown that this solidarity of the 'oppressed'—the alliance of the middle and working classes—invariably broke up as conflicts of class interest developed. Bourgeois political and national revolutions did not aim at establishing a social democracy with the common people as the ruling class, but at an illusory form of democracy which would conceal the supremacy of the middle class, Their object was capitalism, not Socialism.
What, concretely, should be the objective of this new International founded in St Martin's Hall? None of the speeches, English or French, contained a clear answer to the question. They repeated the habitual complaints against social and political injustice, expressed in the most general terms. They spoke of freedom and the brotherhood of nations. The English address referred to the common interests of the workers of all countries in struggles for higher wages and better working conditions. The French reply indicted the capitalist system for dividing society into contending classes and enslaving the workers. But the idea of Socialism—a society based on collective property and free from capitalist exploitation—was not expressed. All the speakers appealed to working-class solidarity. But none of them envisaged the future international workers' organization as a political or even a trade-union body. The plan of organization proposed by the French and accepted by the meeting saw the new International as having only one task: to probe and discuss questions of interest to the working class.
The meeting at St Martin's Hall, therefore, gave neither an organizational shape nor a programme of aims, nor even a name, to the new International. These tasks were specially entrusted to the provisional central committee elected at the meeting.
1. For a detailed account of the early history of the International, see D. Riazanov, 'Zur Geschichte der Ersten Internationale', Marx-Engels Archiv, vol. I (1925). For an examination of the sources on the origin of the International, see Helmut Hirsch, Denker und Kämpfer (Frankfurt am Main, 1955), pp. 131–44.
2. For the full text, see Riazanov, op. cit., p. 172.
3. Marx-Engels Briefwechsel, vol. III, p. 235. A report of the meeting appeared in Beehive, 10 October 1864, reprinted in Founding of the First International. A Documentary Record, edited by L. E. Mins (New York, 1937).
4. Friedrich Lessner, 'Vor und nach 1848, Erinnerungen eines alten Kommunisten', Deutsche Worte, p. 158; see also Henry Collins and Chimen Abramsky, Karl Marx and the British Labour Movement (London, 1965), pp. 30–4.