"The Internationale Source: Eugène Pottier, Chants Révolutionnaires. Paris, Comité Pottier, [n.d. 1890-1900] Translated: for marxists.org by Mitchell Abidor Translator’s note: Eugène Pottier wrote the “Internationale” just weeks after the crushing of the Paris Commune, in June 1871. Hiding from the authorities, soon to be condemned to death in absentia, he wrote it while waiting to flee to London. Published in his 1887 collection “Chants Révolutionnaires,” it was set to music a year later by Pierre Degeyter, but did not immediately become the hymn of the international working class. In fact, in 1893, when Engels addressed the International Workers Congress in Zurich, the delegates sang the “Marseillaise.” According to the French historian Michel Winock it was the followers of Jules Guesde in the Socialist Party of France who first adopted the song at the time of the Dreyfus Affair, and it was in 1900 that they presented it at the International Congress in Paris. It was only then that the song began its conquest of the world. The following translation is a literal one of all the song’s stanzas. Most other translations are meant to be sung, and so radically change Pottier’s original sense. This is the song as Pottier wrote it. To Citizen Lefranςais, member of the Commune ’Tis the final conflict, Let us unite and tomorrow, The International Will be the human race Arise, the damned of the earth! Arise, prisoners of hunger! Reason thunders in its crater, ’Tis the eruption of the end. Let’s make a clean slate of the past, Enslaved mass, arise, arise! The world’s foundation will change, We are nothing, now let’s be all! There are no supreme saviors, Neither God, nor Caesar nor tribune; Producers, let us save ourselves, We decree common salvation! So that the thief should offer us his throat So that spirit be wrested from its cell, Let us fan the forge’s flames ourselves And strike while the iron is hot. The state represses, the law cheats, Taxes bleed the poor; No duties are imposed on the rich, The rights of the poor are empty words, We have languished long enough under domination, Equality wants other laws: “No rights without duties,” it says “Equals, there are no duties without rights.” Hideous in their apotheosis, The kings of mines and rails, Have they ever done aught But rob from labor? In the safes of that gang What is created is smelted, By decreeing that they turn it over The people only want what is their due. Kings intoxicated us with smoke, Peace among us, war on tyrants! Let’s apply the strike to armies, Rifle butts raised on high and breaking ranks. And if they insist, those cannibals, On making heroes of us, They’ll soon learn that our bullets Are for our own generals. Workers, farmers, we are The great party of the workers, The earth belongs only to men, Idlers can go someplace else. How many on our flesh eat their fill? But if the ravens, the vultures One morning disappeared The sun would shine still! ’Tis the final conflict Let us unite and tomorrow, The International Will be the human race — Paris, June 1871 https://www.marxists.org/history/ussr/sounds/lyrics/international.htm"

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