First Address Of The General Council of The International Working Men’s Association On The Franco-Prussian War [1]¶
Core Argument¶
Marx’s first address on the Franco-Prussian War, drafted for the General Council of the International Working Men’s Association in July 1870, argues that the conflict is a dynastic war imposed from above, against which the organised working class of both France and Germany has already declared its fraternal opposition. The address opens by recalling the International’s founding principle: that foreign policy must be governed by the same moral laws that regulate relations between individuals. Louis Bonaparte, the address contends, recognised the International as a mortal enemy precisely because it exposed his regime’s reliance on war and domestic repression. The plebiscite of May 1870 is presented as the immediate prelude to war: the French branches of the International campaigned openly against it, denouncing it as a vote for despotism at home and war abroad, and the industrial working class rejected it en masse. Only the ignorance of the rural districts saved Bonaparte, and the plebiscite became the signal for war.
Marx draws on a series of contemporary working-class manifestos to demonstrate that the International’s opposition to the war was not sectarian but broadly representative. The Paris section’s appeal to the workmen of all nations, published on 12 July, is quoted at length: it denounces war as a “criminal absurdity” fought for dynastic or preponderance questions, and calls for unity across the Rhine. Similar declarations from Neuilly-sur-Seine and from German workers’ meetings in Brunswick, Chemnitz, and Berlin are cited to show that German workers likewise understood the war as dynastic and defensive only in the narrowest sense. The address is careful to distinguish between the war’s character on each side: for Germany it is a war of defence, but Marx immediately qualifies this by blaming Prussia for enabling Bonaparte’s aggression in the first place. Bismarck, he argues, conspired with Bonaparte to crush domestic opposition and annex Germany to the Hohenzollerns; after Prussia’s victory at Sadowa, it copied the Bonapartist regime’s despotism and political shams rather than opposing a free Germany to an enslaved France. The war, on this reading, is the logical outcome of the reactionary symbiosis between the two regimes.
The polemical thrust is directed against both Bonapartism and Prussian militarism, but also against any German worker who might allow the war to lose its defensive character and become a war of conquest against the French people. Marx warns that if German workers permit this, victory or defeat will prove equally disastrous, and Germany will repeat the misery that followed its wars of independence. A further polemical target is Tsarist Russia: the address notes that the war was signalled at the moment Russia completed strategic railways and massed troops on the Prut, and warns Germans that accepting Cossack help would leave them prostrate before the tsar as they were after 1815. The address concludes by counterposing the fratricidal feud of official France and Germany to the “great fact, unparallelled in the history of the past” of French and German workers exchanging messages of peace and goodwill. This, Marx argues, proves that a new society is emerging whose international rule will be peace and whose national ruler will be labour—and whose pioneer is the International Working Men’s Association.