Recovering Eugene Pottier: The “Internationale” and its Communard Lyricist

Paul Buhle

Posted September 16, 2024

Beyond the Internationale:
Revolutionary Writings by Eugene Pottier, Communard
Edited and Translated by Loren Kruger
Chicago: Charles H. Kerr Company, 2023,
150pp. $17 paperback.

BACK IN MY days of teaching U.S. history, I would pull out a tape recording made by an ancient friend, an erstwhile Trotskyist living out his last years outside Seattle, his singing in Yiddish with a piano accompaniment.

He began with the Jewish Bund anthem, mostly a tale of suffering mixed with determination, and close with “The Internationale,” full of a sense of impending triumph. It was the Yiddish one-two punch of the Revolution, the one hoped for so much by so many over the generations.

As the publisher’s summary states:

“Many people the world over know the ‘Internationale.’ Since its appearance as a battle song on the barricades in May 1871, near the end of the short-lived but inspiring Paris Commune, the ‘Internationale’ has been published or recorded in more than eighty languages in addition to the original French and remains the foremost anthem of transnational struggles for social justice and equality.”

Beyond the Internationale provides a wide variety of material in a fairly small space, and this richness or depth is easily the principal charm, not to mention documentary value, of the volume. The book offers, first, the life of the lyricist Eugene Pottier (1816-1887), who fled France in 1871 after taking part in the Commune, coming to the United States where he gave florid public lectures to the little socialist movement, returning to his native land in 1880.

Second is the story of the song, as it reached a new public and as it traveled far and wide. Third is the lyrics in dozens of versions, alphabetically Afrikaans (spoken by African blacks as well as Dutch settlers) to Zulu, with socialist and anarchist adoptions from Latin America to Russia. Only Asians, of the major language groups, seem to have been left out, although on a personal note, I might regret the absence of Finnish.

Even in distant northern Wisconsin and across the border to Minnesota, immigrant Finns some generations ago would gather at the Winter and Summer Solstice, sing the song among others, dance, drink heavily and head for the Saunas. It must have been something to see, and young Bob Dylan would have been close enough to watch or even vicariously take part, if he took an interest.

Editor Loren Kruger usefully notes that the lyrics, composed after the violent destruction of the Commune, accompanied or were accompanied by the “La Marseillaise.” Only in 1888, after Pottier’s death, did Pierre Degeyter provide the score, initially heard at a proletarian song contest in Lille, northern France.

It was the Charles H. Kerr Company, in 1894, that published an English-language translation. Two years later, an initial German version emerged. In the following decades, it would be taken up globally. Kruger quotes Billy Bragg (whose blurb appears on the back cover) offering the hope, in 1990, that the song, perhaps in his own new version, could still “unite the world in song.”

The Forgotten History

Pottier’s U.S. travels and speech-giving have remained little known until now, and Beyond the Internationale gives us not only a glimpse of the writer-intellectual but of a forgotten moment in this country’s Left history. The editor does not say so, but Victoria Woodhull, free lover and first U.S. publisher of The Communist Manifesto in English (in Woodhull and Claflins Weekly), led the march in Manhattan honoring the martyred Communards.

A few years later, young labor leader Sam Gompers turned tail and ran from a workers’ “riot” in Tompkins Square Park, learning a lesson in conservative unionism. In 1878, a year after the violent Railroad Strike (with a short-lived but very real Commune in St. Louis), U.S. socialists elected dozens of candidates to office across several states. In other words, Pottier had an audience, likely almost as anarchist- as socialist-minded.

He was a stem-winding orator. One of the speeches, given on the date of the Commune’s  anniversary, March 18, 1878, comes toward a closing with these eco-phrases after asking, “what is life but a living commune?” — answering “Let us return to Nature after centuries of separation; she will spread her green carpet, light her lamps and all the wonders of science and art.” (38-39)

Sadly, the political excitement did not last. Wherever socialists seemed to make electoral advances, Democrats seemed to return to power through reform promises and/or theft of socialist votes.

The playing and singing of “The Internationale” would find audiences in the United States across most of the twentieth century, of course, but the images that we have mostly encountered seem to be armed forces days in Moscow. Not so elsewhere. Curiously, a revised German edition dating to 1929 is less militant than the original, as if (although this seems highly unlikely) anticipating the Popular Front. A contemporary Russian edition encompassed the revisionist thought that “socialism” has already been realized in the USSR.

Never mind. Kruger has done excellent work. As he says, the important thing is to translate the function of the phrase. Thus, “marching songs” demand the occasional abandonment from the rhyming lines of the original, just as elegies for comrades, to be voiced in reverence, favor free verse.

For Our Time

Pottier himself favored the sonnet style, presuming his nineteenth century audience would readily grasp where he was going. Twentieth century renditions and, one supposes, those of the current century as well, take on yet newer forms, and have very often been collectively altered for time and place, with no given lyricist. Billy Bragg, then, is only a recent continuator, if a spectacular one. Others will surely follow.

Readers of this book will wish to dig right into the dozens of versions of the famed lyric, but also into the poetry of Eugene Pottier himself, including “Women On Strike” (1867) calling for universal disarmament and ending with the hoisting of the Red Flag.

My own memories go back to a Golden Gate Park picnic in San Francisco in the Fall of 1963, with a copy of the Weekly People annual Commune issue in hand. I must have been the youngest picnicker by several generations. The little Socialist Labor Party, publishers of The People, had peaked in membership around 1906 but hung on as a “Propagandist” or “Trachterian” organization of the self-educated working class, often the same families generation after generation. Many future SDSers, lacking leftwing relatives, took the “Marxist Study Class” by mail, and I fell into the group by accident.

We, the collective We, remembered and commemorated the Paris Commune that afternoon. I wonder if we sang “The Internationale.”

Paul Buhle is a very longtime historian of the U.S. socialist movements and co-editor, with Mari Jo Buhle, of the Encyclopedia of the American Left.

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