62. K. Marx. Report of the General Council to the Fifth Annual Congress of the International Working Men's Association Held at The Hague, from the 2nd to the 7th September 1872
First published, in Russian, in Generalny Translated from the French Sovet Pervogo Internatsionala. 1871-1872, Moscow, 1965 Karl Marx
62. K. Marx. Report of the General Council to the Fifth Annual Congress of the International Working Men's Association Held at The Hague, from the 2nd to the 7th September 1872[164]
[The International Herald, No. 27, October 5, 1872]
Citizens,(1)—Since our last Congress at Basel, two great wars have changed the face of Europe: the Franco-German War and the Civil War in France. Both of these wars were preceded, accompanied, and followed by a third war — the war against the International Working Men's Association.
The Paris members(2) of the International had told the French people publicly and emphatically, that voting the plebiscite [165] was voting despotism at home and war abroad.(3) Under the pretext of having participated in a plot for the assassination of Louis Bonaparte, they were arrested on the eve of the plebiscite, the 23rd of April, 1870. Simultaneous arrests of Internationalists took place at Lyons, Rouen, Marseilles, Brest, and other towns. In its declaration of May 3rd, 1870, the General Council stated(4):
"This last plot will worthily range with its two predecessors of grotesque memory. The noisy and violent measures against our French sections are exclusively intended to serve one single purpose — the manipulation of the plebiscite."(5) In point of fact, after the downfall of the December empire its governmental successors published documentary evidence(6) to the effect that this last plot had been fabricated by the Bonapartist police itself, and that on the eve of the plebiscite, Ollivier, in a private circular, directly told his subordinates,
"The leaders of the International must be arrested or else the voting of the plebiscite could not be satisfactorily proceeded with."
The plebiscitary farce once over, the members of the Paris Federal Council were indeed condemned, on the 8th of July, by Louis Bonaparte's own judges, but for the simple crime of belonging to the International and not for any participation in the sham plot.[166] Thus the Bonapartist government considered it necessary to initiate the most ruinous war that was ever brought down upon France, by a preliminary campaign against the French sections of the International Working Men's Association. Let us not forget that the working class in France rose like one man to reject the plebiscite. Let us no more forget that
"the stock-exchanges, the cabinets, the ruling classes, and the press of Europe celebrated the plebiscite as a signal victory of the French emperor over the French working class."—(Address of General Council on the Franco-Prussian War, 23rd July, 1870.)
A few weeks after the plebiscite, when the imperialist press commenced to fan the warlike passions amongst the French people, the Paris Internationalists, nothing daunted by the government persecutions, issued their appeal of the 12th of July, "to the workmen of all nations", denounced the intended war as a "criminal absurdity", telling their "brothers of Germany", that
their "division would only result in the complete triumph of despotism on both sides of the Rhine", and declaring that "we, the members of the International Association, know of no frontiers."*(7)
Their appeal met with an enthusiastic echo from Germany, so that the General Council was entitled to state,
"The very fact that while official France and Germany are rushing into a fratricidal feud, the workmen of France and Germany send each other messages of peace and good will — this great fact, unparalleled in the history of the past — opens the vista of a brighter future. It proves that in contrast to old society with its economical miseries and its political delirium, a new society is springing up whose international rule will be peaces because its national ruler will be everywhere the same— Labour. The pioneer of that new society is the International Working Men's Association."—(Address of July 23rd, 1870.)
Up to the proclamation of the Republic, the members of the Paris Federal Council remained in prison, while the other members of the Association were daily denounced to the mob as traitors acting in the pay of Prussia.
With the capitulation of Sedan, when the second empire ended as it began, by a parody,[167] the Franco-German War entered upon its second phase. It became war against the French people. After her repeated solemn declarations to take up arms for the sole purpose of repelling foreign aggression, Prussia now dropped the mask and proclaimed a war of conquest. From that moment she found herself compelled not only to fight the Republic in France, but simultaneously the International in Germany. We can here but hint at a few incidents of that conflict.
[The International Herald, No. 28, October 12, 1872] Immediately after the declaration of war, the greater part of the territory of the North German Confederation, Hanover, Olden-burg, Bremen, Hamburg, Brunswick, Schleswig-Holstein, Mecklen-burg, Pomerania, and the province of Prussia, were placed in a state of siege, and handed over to the tender mercies of General Vogel von Falckenstein. This state of siege, proclaimed as a safeguard against the threatening foreign invasion, was at once turned into a state of war against the German Internationals.
The day after the proclamation of the Republic at Paris, the Brunswick Central Committee of the German Democratic Socialist Working Men's Party, which forms a section of the International within the limits imposed by the law of the country, issued a manifesto (5th September) calling upon the working class to oppose by all means in their power the dismemberment of France, to claim a peace honourable for that country, and to agitate for the recognition of the French Republic.[168] The manifesto denounced the proposed annexation of Alsace and Lorraine as a crime tending to transform all Germany into a Prussian barracks, and to establish war as a permanent European institution. On the 9th September, Vogel von Falckenstein had the members of the Brunswick Committee arrested, and marched off in chains, a distance of 600 miles, to Loetzen, a Prussian fortress, on the Russian frontier, where their ignominious treatment was to serve as a foil to the ostentatious feasting of the Imperial guest at Wilhelmshöhe.[169] As arrests, the hunting of workmen from one German state to another, suppression of proletarian papers, military brutality, and police-chicane in all forms, did not prevent the International vanguard of the German working class from acting up to the Brunswick manifesto, Vogel von Falckenstein, by an ukase of September 21st,[3] interdicted all meetings of the Democratic Socialist party. That interdict was cancelled by another ukase of October 5th, wherein he naively commands the police spies
"to denounce to him personally all individuals who, by public demonstrations, shall encourage France in her resistance against the conditions of peace imposed by Germany, so as to enable him to render such individuals innocuous during the continuance of the war".
Leaving the cares of the war abroad to Moltke, the King of Prussia contrived to give a new turn to the war at home. By his personal order of the 17th October, Vogel von Falckenstein was to lend his Loetzen captives to the Brunswick District Tribunal, the which, on its part, was either to find grounds for their legal durance, or else return them to the safe keeping of the dread general.
Vogel von Falckenstein's proceedings were, of course, imitated throughout Germany, while Bismarck, in a diplomatic circular, mocked Europe by standing forth as the indignant champion of the right of free utterance of opinion, free press, and free meetings, on the part of the peace party in France. At the very same time that he demanded a freely-elected National Assembly for France, in Germany he had Bebel and Liebknecht imprisoned for having, in opposition to him, represented the International in the German Parliament, and in order to get them out of the way during the impending general elections.[170]
His master, William the Conqueror,(8) supported him, by a decree from Versailles, prolonging the state of siege, that is to say, the suspension of all civil law, for the whole period of the elections. In fact, the King did not allow the state of siege to be raised in Germany until two months after the conclusion of peace with France. The stubbornness with which he was insisting upon the state of war at home, and his repeated personal meddling with his own German captives, prove the awe in which he, amidst the din of victorious arms and the frantic cheers of the whole middle class, held the rising party of the proletariat. It was the involuntary homage paid by physical force to moral power.
If the war against the International had been localised, first in France, from the days of the plebiscite to the downfall of the Empire, then in Germany during the whole period of the resistance of the Republic against Prussia, it became general since the rise, and after the fall, of the Paris Commune.
On the 6th of June, 1871, Jules Favre issued his circular to the Foreign Powers demanding the extradition of the refugees(9) of the Commune as common criminals, and a general crusade against the International as the enemy of family, religion, order, and property, so adequately represented in his own person.[172] Austria and Hungary caught the cue at once. On the 13th June, a raid was made on the reputed leaders of the Pesth Working Men's Union, their papers were seized, their persons sequestered, and proceedings were instituted against them for high treason.[173] Several delegates of the Vienna International, happening to be on a visit to Pesth, were carried off to Vienna, there to undergo a similar treatment. Beust asked and received from his parliament a supplementary vote of £30,000,
"on behalf of expenses for political information that had become more than ever indispensable through the dangerous spread of the International all over Europe".
Since that time a true reign of terror against the working class has set in in Austria and Hungary. In its last agonies the Austrian Government seems still anxiously to cling to its old privilege of playing the Don Quixote of European reaction.
A few weeks after Jules Favre's circular, Dufaure proposed to his rurals a law which is now in force, and punishes as a crime the mere fact of belonging to the International Working Men's Association, or of sharing its principles.[174] As a witness before the rural committee of enquiry on Dufaure's Bill, Thiers boasted that it was the offspring of his own ingenious brains, and that he had been the first to discover the infallible panacea of treating the Internationals as the Spanish Inquisition had treated the heretics. But even on this point he can lay no claim to originality. Long before his appointment as saviour of society, the true law which the Internationals deserve at the hands of the ruling classes had been laid down by the Vienna courts.
[The International Herald, No. 29, October 19, 1872]
On the 26th July, 1870, the most prominent men of the Austrian proletarian party were found guilty of high treason, and sentenced to years of penal servitude, with one fast day in every month.[175] The law laid down was this: —
The prisoners, as they themselves confess, have accepted and acted according to the programme of the German Working Men's Congress of Eisenach (1869). This programme embodies the programme of the International. The International is established for the emancipation of the working class from the rule of the propertied class, and from political dependence. That emancipation is incompatible with the existing institutions of the Austrian state. Hence, whoever accepts and propagates the principles of the International programme, commits preparatory acts for the overthrow of the Austrian Government, and is consequently guilty of high treason.
On the 27th November, 1871, judgment was passed upon the members of the Brunswick Committee. They were sentenced to various periods of imprisonment. The court expressly referred, as to a precedent, to the law laid down at Vienna.
At Pesth, the prisoners belonging to the Working Men's Union, after having undergone for nearly a year a treatment as infamous as that inflicted upon the Fenians [176] by the British Government, were broi^ht up for judgment on the 22nd April, 1872. The public prosecutor, here also, called upon the court to apply to them the law laid down at Vienna. They were, however, acquitted.
At Leipzig, on the 27th March, 1872, Bebel and Liebknecht were sentenced to two years imprisonment in a fortress for attempted high treason upon the strength of the law as laid down at Vienna. The only distinctive feature of this case is that the law laid down by a Vienna judge was sanctioned by a Saxon jury.
At Copenhagen the three members of the Central Committee of the International, Brix, Pio, and Geleff, were thrown into prison on the 5th of May(10) because they had declared their firm resolve to hold an open air meeting in the teeth of a police order forbidding it. Once in prison they were told that the accusation against them was extended, that the socialist ideas in themselves were incompatible with the existence of the Danish state, and that consequently the mere act of propagating them constituted a crime against the Danish constitution. Again the law as laid down in Vienna! The accused are still in prison awaiting their trial.[177]
The Belgian government, distinguished by its sympathetic reply to Jules Favre's demand of extradition, made haste to propose, through Malou, a hypocritical counterfeit of Dufaure's law.
His Holiness Pope Pius IX gave vent to his feelings in an allocution to a deputation of Swiss Catholics.
"Your government," said he, "which is republican, thinks itself bound to make a heavy sacrifice for what is called liberty. It affords an asylum to a goodly number of individuals of the worst character. It tolerates that sect of the International which desires to treat all Europe as it has treated Paris. These gentlemen of the International who are no gendemen, are to be feared because they work for the account of the everlasting enemy of God and mankind. What is to be gained by protecting them! One must pray for them."
Hang them first and pray for them afterwards! Supported by Bismarck, Beust, and Stieber, the Prussian spy-in-chief, the Emperors of Austria and Germany met at Salzburg in the beginning of September, 1871, for the ostensible purpose of founding a holy alliance against the International Working Men's Association.[178]
"Such a European Alliance," declared the North German Gazette,3 Bismarck's private moniteur}' "is the only possible salvation of state, church, property, civilisation, in one word, of everything that constitutes European states."
Bismarck's real object, of course, was to prepare alliances for an impending war with Russia and the International was held up to Austria as a piece of red cloth is held up to a bull.
Lanza suppressed the International in Italy by simple decree. Sagasta declared it an outlaw in Spain,[179] probably with a view to curry favour with the English stock exchange. The Russian government which, since the emancipation of the serfs, has been driven to the dangerous expedient of making timid concessions to popular claims today, and withdrawing them tomorrow, found in the general hue and cry against the International a pretext for a recrudescence of reaction at home. Abroad, with the intention of prying into the secrets of our Association, it succeeded in inducing a* Swiss judge to search, in presence of a Russian spy, the house of Outine, a Russian International, and the editor of the Geneva Egalité, the organ of our Romance Federation.[180] The republican government of Switzerland has only been prevented by the agitation of the Swiss Internationals from handing up to Thiers refugees of the Commune.
Finally, the government of Mr. Gladstone, unable to act in Great Britain, at least set forth its good intentions by the police terrorism exercised in Ireland against our sections then in course of formation, and by ordering its representatives abroad to collect information with respect to the International Working Men's Association.
But all the measures of repression which the combined government intellect of Europe was capable of devising, vanish into nothing before the war of calumny undertaken by the lying power of the civilised world. Apocryphal histories and mysteries of the International, shameless forgeries of public documents and private letters, sensational telegrams, followed each other in rapid succession; all the sluices of slander at the disposal of the venal respectable press were opened at once to set free a deluge of infamy in which to drown the execrated foe. This war of calumny finds no parallel in history for the truly international area over which it has spread, and for the complete accord in which it has been carried on by all shades of ruling class opinion. When the great conflagration took place at Chicago, the telegraph round the world announced it as the infernal deed of the International; and it is really wonderful that to its demoniacal agency has not been attributed the hurricane ravaging the West Indies.
In its former annual reports, the General Council used to give a review of the progress of the Association since the meeting of the preceding Congress. You will appreciate, citizens,(11) the motives which induce us to abstain from that course upon this occasion. Moreover, the reports of the delegates from the various countries, who know best how far their discretion may extend, will in a measure make up for this deficiency. We confine ourselves to the statement that since the Congress at Basel, and chiefly since the London Conference of September 1871, the International has been extended to the Irish in England and to Ireland itself, to Holland, Denmark, and Portugal, that it has been firmly organised in the United States, and that it has established ramifications in Buenos Aires, Australia, and New Zealand.
The difference between a working class without an International, and a working class with an International, becomes most evident if we look back to the period of 1848. Years were required for the working class itself to recognise the Insurrection of June, 1848, as the work of its own vanguard. The Paris Commune was at once acclaimed by the universal proletariat.
You, the delegates of the working class, meet to strengthen the militant organisation of a society aiming at the emancipation of labour and the extinction of national feuds. Almost at the same moment, there meet at Berlin tl world in order to forge new ch
Long life to the International
e crowned dignitaries of the old tins and to hatch new wars.[181]
Working Men's Association!
Endnotes
[164] The task of the Hague Congress was to adopt the resolutions of the 1871 London Conference on the political activity of the working class and against the sectarian sections. Marx and Engels devoted much effort to preparing the Congress. With their active participation the General Council discussed and adopted the proposals to the Congress on the changes in the Rules and Regulations of the International, first of all, on the inclusion in the Rules of the resolution on the political activity of the working class and on the extension of the General Council's powers. The Hague Congress was the most representative. Sixty-five delegates from 15 national organisations were present. The Congress summed up the many years' struggle waged by Marx, Engels and their associates against all kinds of petty-bourgeois sectarianism in the workers' movement, Bakuninism above all. The anarchist leaders were expelled from the International. The Hague Congress decisions laid the foundation for future independent political parties of the working class in various countries. At its meeting of July 19, 1872, the Sub-Committee instructed Marx to write the General Council's report and to deliver it at the Hague Congress. The report was confirmed by the General Council at the end of August. Before reading it in German at the open session of the Congress on September 5, Marx warned those present that he would only oudine the work of the International since the report was intended for the press. The report was then read by the Congress secretaries in French, English and Dutch and adopted by all delegates except those from Spain.
[165] On April 23, 1870, the French government published a decree on holding a plebiscite, the purpose of which was to bolster up the shaky position of the government of Napoleon III. The questions were so worded that it was impossible to express disapproval of the Second Empire's policy without also opposing all democratic reforms. The plebiscite took place on May 8, 1870 and demonstrated a considerable growth of opposition to the Bonapartist regime.
[166] This refers to the third trial of the members of the Paris organisation of the International, held from June 22 to July 8, 1870. Thirty-eight people, active in the workers' movement, were put on trial, including Eugène Varlin (he managed to flee), Leo Frankel, Jules Johannard, Augustin Avrial, Louis Chalain. The accused were sentenced to various terms of imprisonment — from two months to a year — and were fined.
[167] An ironical allusion to the outward semblance of historical events preceding the establishment and the fall of the two empires in France, i. e. of Napoleon I and of Napoleon III. In both cases the empires were established after coup d'états (on November 9, 1799 and on December 2, 1851) and fell after military defeats and the capture of the emperors (Napoleon I was defeated at Waterloo on July 18, 1815 and Napoleon III together with the French Army capitulated at Sedan on September 2, 1870, during the Franco-Prussian war).
[168] On September 5, 1870, the Brunswick Committee of the German Social-Democratic Workers' Party issued a manifesto "An alle deutschen Arbeiter". It was published as a leaflet and also in Der Volksstaat, No. 73, September 11, 1870. All the members of the Committee were arrested on September 9 (see notes 26 and 59).
[169] Wilhelmshöhe (near Kassel)—a castle of the Prussian Kings where Napoleon III, former Emperor of France, was held prisoner by the Prussians from September 5, 1870 to March 19, 1871.
[3] Jules Gottraux, a Swiss-born subject of Great Britain and a member of the International, was detained by the French police on the French-Swiss frontier on September 30, 1866, when he was returning to London from Switzerland. The police confiscated letters, printed matter, and other material entrusted to him by the International's leaders in Geneva for delivery to the General Council. The seized documents included the preliminary report on the work of the Geneva Congress which had been drawn up by Council member Joseph Card and published in French in Geneva as a pamphlet. (Later, this gave rise to rumours that the French authorities had confiscated the Congress minutes, which in fact had bv that time been brought to London by Hermann Jung.) The General Council decided to lodge a complaint about this wanton act and to use the fact publicly to expose the regime of the Second Empire. At the beginning of December, the Council addressed the British Foreign Secretary, requesting him to make a corresponding démarche to the French government, which forced the French authorities to return, on December 21, the materials taken from Gottraux.
[170] On November 26, 1870, when the German Reichstag discussed the question of new loans for the war with France, August Bebel and Wilhelm Liebknecht refused to vote for them and demanded that a peace treaty without annexations should be concluded with the French Republic as soon as possible. Bebel was arrested on December 17 and Liebknecht somewhat later (see Note 59). Despite this, Bebel was again elected deputy to the Reichstag during the general elections in March 1871.
[172] On Jules Favre's circular of June 6, 1871 see Note 82; for his circular dispatch of May 26, 1871 on the extradition of the Commune refugees see Note 57.
[173] The General Working Men's Union, the first socialist organisation in Hungary set up in Pesth in February 1868, conducted the socialist propaganda in major industrial towns and directed workers' strikes. Its leaders (Kâroly Farkas, Antal Ihrlinger) were also members of the Hungarian Section of the International Association and had contacts with Austrian and German Social-Democrats and directly with Marx. On June 11, 1871, the Union organised a demonstration of solidarity with the Paris Commune. The government dissolved the Union, and its leaders and representatives of the Austrian working class who had come from Vienna were arrested on charge of treason. They were acquitted, however, for lack of evidence and under pressure of public opinion.
[174] On the Dufaure law see Note 57.
[175] On the persecution of the leaders of the Austrian Social-Democratic Party in the summer of 1870 see Note 59.
[176] The Fenians were Irish revolutionaries who named themselves after the "Feni" — the name of the ancient inhabitants of Ireland. Their first organisations appeared in the 1850s in the USA among the Irish immigrants and later in Ireland itself. The secret Irish Revolutionary Brotherhood, as the organisation was known in the 1860s, aimed at establishing an independent Irish republic by means of an armed uprising. The Fenians, who objectively expressed the interests of the Irish peasantry, came chiefly from the urban petty bourgeoisie and intelligentsia and believed in conspiracy tactics. The British government attempted to suppress the Fenian movement by severe police reprisals. The Fenians in British prisons were brutally treated, the cruelties becoming even worse after the abortive uprising of Fenians in February-March 1867. The General Council of the International more than once came out in defence of the Fenians and condemned the punitive measures taken against them by the British government (see present edition, Vol. 20, p. 339 and Vol. 21, pp. 3-4, 407-10).
[177] Louis Pio, Paul Johansen Geleff and Harold Brix, the leaders of the Danish Federation of the International, were arrested as early as May 1872, and sentenced in March 1873 to various terms of imprisonment (from four to six years) for an attempt "to organise a coup d'état and establish a socialist state". In August the authorities banned the sections of the International in Denmark.
[178] For the meeting of William I and Francis Joseph in Salzburg see Note 58.
[179] In his circular of August 14, 1871, Giovanni Lanza, Italian Minister of the Interior, ordered the dissolution of the International's sections. On August 20, the Naples Section was disbanded. In January 1872, Prâxedes Mateo Sagasta, Spanish Minister of the Interior, issued a similar circular. Lanza's and Sagasta's circulars were a reply by the Italian and Spanish governments to Jules Favre's call for a joint struggle against the International.
[180] Between January 26 and 28, 1872, the house of Nikolai Utin was searched and his private papers and the documents of the International Association were inspected. On February 20, the General Council expressed its resolute protest against this act of arbitrariness in a special declaration written by Marx and Engels (see this volume, pp. 77-78).
[181] The Emperors of Germany (William I), Austria-Hungary (Francis Joseph) and Russia (Alexander II) met in Berlin in September 1872 to resurrect the. reactionary alliance of these countries. An important point in the discussion was a joint struggle against the revolutionary movement.