Resolved. That the General Council of the I.W.A. repudiates all responsibility for the address[3] delivered at the public meeting in Cleveland Hall by Félix Pyat, who is in no way connected with the Association.
Adopted by the General Council on Reproduced from the Minute July 7, 1868 Book of the General Council
Endnotes
[6] " The public meeting to celebrate the anniversary of the June 1848 insurrection of the Paris workers was held on June 29, 1868 in the Cleveland Hall, London. Such meetings were annually held by the German Workers' Educational Society in London jointly with other émigré organisations. The French petty-bourgeois democrat Félix Pyat, who attended the meeting, delivered a speech and moved a provocative resolution urging terroristic acts against Napoleon III (the resolution was published in The Bee-Hive, No. 351, July 4, 1868). The Brussels Espiègle, No. 25, July 5, 1868, published a report of the meeting which described it as a meeting of the International with Pyat as one of its leaders. This statement was repeated in other newspapers. The General Council held that this could discredit the International in the eyes of the workers and give the Bonapartist government a pretext for the persecution of its members in France and Belgium. Consequently, at its meeting on July 7 the Council resolved, on Marx's proposal, to disavow Pyat's behaviour in a resolution to this effect (see also Marx's letter to Engels of July 7, 1868, present edition, Vol. 43). When the General Council's resolution against Pyat appeared in the press, a split took place in the French Section in London, of which he was a member. Eugène Dupont, Hermann Jung, Paul Lafargue and other proletarian members of the section expressed their disapproval of Pyat's adventurous and provocative tactics and withdrew from it. Pyat's group lost ties with the International but continued to act in its name and repeatedly supported anti-proletarian elements opposing Marx's line in the General Council. On May 10, 1870, the General Council officially dissociated itself from this group (see this volume, pp. 127-28). The text of this resolution has been preserved in the Minutes of the General Council meeting of July 7, 1868. It was first published in La Liberté, No. 55, July 12, 1868 and reproduced in La Cigale, No. 29, July 19, La Tribune du Peuple, No. 7, July 26, 1868 (with the end of the resolution denying Pyat's connections with the International omitted), and in other newspapers. This resolution was first published in English in The General Council of the First International. 1866-1868, Moscow, 1964.
[3] Marx wrote this item on the basis of a letter from Johann Baptist Schweitzer dated April 29, 1868. The item was included in the report of the General Council meeting of May 12, 1868 published in The Bee-Hive Newspaper, No. 344, May 16, 1868, but is not to be found in the Minute Book. Informing Engels of Schweitzer's letter, Marx wrote to him on May 4, 1868 that he intended "to use this question in the interests of the Party", and insisted on an inquiry into the condition of the workers employed in the iron trade of the Rhine Province (see this letter and Marx's letter to Engels of May 7 and the latter's reply of May 6-7, 1868, present edition, Vol. 43).