The collapse of Chartism played a considerable part in weakening the Fraternal Democrats. A conflict between the two leaders, Harney and Jones, led to its utter ruin.
The conflict, which degenerated into petty personal hostility, was based on the different conceptions held by the two men on the future of the Labour movement. When Chartism collapsed and the hoped-for revival of revolution in Europe failed to materialize, Harney lost faith in the possibility of a purely political working-class movement. He ceased to believe in a future for Chartism, to which he had given so much of his enthusiasm and devotion since his youth. He left the executive in 1852, and soon afterwards broke with the movement complete. A few years later, still scarcely forty, he withdrew from all political activity, first moving to the lonely island of Jersey and finally emigrating to America. But he never abandoned his basic loyalty to Chartism and Socialism. In 1869 he wrote from Boston to the First International's General Council,[1] declaring his adhesion. But for the last forty years of his life, in which the working-class movement gradually rose to new levels of organization and militancy, he played no active part.
In contrast, Jones continued to believe in a Chartist revival. At the end of his two-year sentence in July 1850, and in spite of the fact that his health was broken, he at once flung himself into a propaganda tour of England and Scotland. Everywhere he was received with overwhelming enthusiasm. In Halifax, where he had stood for Parliament and whose workers had sent him as a delegate to the Chartist Convention, a mass demonstration of 10,000 turned out to welcome him. According to a Press report, such an assembly had 'rarely been known in Halifax',[2] and his reception served to strengthen his faith in the future of Chartism.
Ernest Jones (1819–69) was well liked and deeply respected among the working class. He was among other things a poet of quite considerable talent. In their power to move and inspire, his Chartist songs were hardly inferior to the freedom songs of Herwegh and Freiligrath. They were songs of battle, declaimed and sung at hundreds of Labour meetings. The charm, beauty and depth of feeling in Jones's poetry were widely recognized by contemporary critics. But his great reputation among the British working class was not due solely to his gifts as a poet. He was both a brilliant journalist and a powerful public speaker. His writings and speeches conveyed a warmth of feeling for the working-class cause which evoked a deep and genuine response. This was in spite of the fact that Jones was not, by origin, a man of the people. He came from an aristocratic family. His father was a cavalry officer who, after being injured in Wellington's Spanish campaign, had entered the service of the Duke of Cumberland, subsequently King of Hanover. The Duke was Ernest's godfather. He grew up in the atmosphere of high conservatism and court which permeated his home, and was educated at the aristocratic college of St Michael in Lüneburg. When he was eighteen he left Germany, where he had been born, and came to England with his family. He studied law, became a barrister, married the daughter of a rich country gentleman related to the Earl of Derby, was presented to the Queen—in short, lived as a well-to-do gentleman in the world of wealth and power.
By accident he acquired the Northern Star at the beginning of 1846, and from that moment was a convert to Chartism. He became a close colleague of O'Connor and was soon one of the most popular among the Chartist leaders. Like a great many of his colleagues he was imprisoned in 1848. He spent two years in solitary confinement shut up in a small cell without table or chair. For nineteen months of the time he was not even allowed books, pen, ink or paper, and was subjected to the barbaric régime of silence then imposed in English prisons. For uttering a word or even for smiling he had to spend three days in the dark cell on bread and water. Two of the Chartists sentenced at the same time died of exhaustion in prison, and a third soon after his release. While he was in the prison hospital, Jones learned that he could earn his release in return for a promise to abandon politics. He refused the offer.
Ernest Jones lived in the deepest poverty. The fortune he had inherited was lost in the People's Paper, which he founded in 1852 (Marx, at first, helped him to edit the paper and subsequently wrote for it), and his wife was disinherited by her family. W. E. Adams described in his Memoirs how when he saw Jones at a meeting in 1857, 'the pinched face and the threadbare garments told of trial and suffering. A shabby coat buttoned up close round the throat seemed to conceal the poverty to which a too faithful adherence to a lost cause had reduced him.'[3] He declined an income of £2,000 which one of his uncles offered on condition that he gave up his work for the Charter. To his dying breath he remained true to the cause of Socialism and the working class. Both Marx and Engels had a sincere regard for him. The news of his death—he died on his fiftieth birthday in January 1869—caused, as Marx wrote to Engels at the time, 'deep dismay in our household, naturally enough, as he was one of the few old friends'.[4] He died in Manchester, and many thousands of workers marched behind his coffin.
The propaganda tour which Jones had undertaken after his release from prison failed to revive the Chartist movement. The struggling trade unions had lost all faith in political action and after the fiasco of 10 April they wanted to hear nothing more of Chartism. Even the most prominent leaders such as O'Connor, Harney and O'Brian had dropped away. By the end of 1852 Jones remained the solitary leader of the small band still faithful to the movement. He re-formed the executive, provided Chartism with an organ in the People's Paper, and in an attempt to organize the working class—Chartists, trade unionists and member of co-operative societies—into one united body, convened a 'Parliament of Labour' in Manchester in March 1854.
The idea he put forward was that the 'Labour Parliament' should function as the political instrument of the working class, as Parliament was an instrument of the ruling class. It should be in permanent session and look after the interests of the workers. It was to direct trade-union and political struggles, finance strikes as acts of working-class solidarity, and develop co-operative societies with the savings of working people.
It was a bold but utopian idea. But even Marx, for whom the failure of the European revolution had been a deeply sobering experience, sent an exuberant letter to the 'Labour Parliament', which elected him an honorary delegate at its opening session. 'The mere assembling of such a Parliament,' he wrote, 'marks a new epoch in the history of the world. The news of this great fact will arouse the hopes of the working classes throughout Europe and America.…If the Labour Parliament proves true to the idea that called it into life, some future historian will have to record that there existed in the year 1854 two Parliaments in England, a Parliament in London, and a Parliament in Manchester—a Parliament of the rich and a Parliament of the poor. …'[5] These hopes remained unfulfilled, and the 'Parliament of the poor' lapsed after a few weeks.
But later in the same year the idea of an international organization of the working class was revived. The Crimean War, which started in October 1853 with a declaration of war by Turkey against Russia, stirred England to the depths. Both the bourgeoisie and the workers hated Russian despotism. Liberals and Radicals, Chartists and Socialists, Marx and Jones pressed the government to help Turkey in her war against Russia, against the Russia which Marx had been denouncing since 1848 as 'the great bastion of European reaction'. A passionate surge of national feeling forced a reluctant government to declare war on Russia in March 1854.[6] But Britain had as her ally in the war against Russian autocracy the France of Louis Napoleon, the man who had seized power in a coup d'état, drowned all protests in blood and erected his throne over the dead body of the French Republic. Up to the signing of the Anglo-French military alliance, he had been regarded by liberal opinion in England as the incarnation of evil. But now that he was an ally, liberal England was ready on the whole to forget his misdeeds and make its peace with him.
However, English Socialists and some at least among the middle-class liberals had not forgotten Napoleon's misdeeds. When it was known in the autumn of 1845 that Armand Barbès, Blanqui's comrade-in-arms, had been pardoned after years of imprisonment, and that Louis Napoleon was about to visit England, Jones called for a committee which would invite Barbès to England and at the same time protest publicly against Napoleon's visit. The new organization was established under the name of the Welcome and Protest Committee. It called a meeting on 4 December, the anniversary of the massacre on the streets of Paris two days after Napoleon's coup d'état, to 'welcome a famous refugee and protest against a dishonourable tyrant'. A few weeks later, the Englishmen on the committee were joined by delegates of the Socialist groups of refugees from France, Germany and Poland. This committee was the nucleus of the 'International Association'.[7]
The International Committee made its first public appearance on 27 February 1855 with a mass meeting in St Martin's Hall, the Hall in which the First International was to be founded nine years later. The Russian revolutionary Alexander Herzen, the French Socialist Alfred Talandier, the Chartist leader George Jacob Holyoake, all spoke; and letters from Barbès, Victor Hugo and Stanislas Worzell were read to the meeting. The resolution, which was moved by the leading Chartist, James Finlen, declared that every alliance 'with despots and criminals such as Franz Joseph of Austria, Louis Napoleon Bonaparte of France and Nicholas of Russia is an infamous disgrace'. It proposed the formation of a permanent International Association, to serve as the core of an 'alliance of peoples', and suggested that an international conference be called 'to proclaim and propagate the principles of a democratic and social republic'.
Jones, who presided at the meeting, appealed in his opening speech to the 'men of Europe'. 'Kings have invented the idea of hostile nationalities so as to split the unity of the peoples,' he declared. 'But democracy shines over all nations like the sun, whose rays never change their colour, irrespective of whether they fall on France or on England, on Germans or on Poles. We are therefore the soldiers of democracy, the vanguard of the world army of liberation.'
Jones then expounded the 'three great and solemn purposes' for which the International Association intended to struggle: 'to protest against alliance with tyrants, and the use of our name in those alliances; to help the oppressed nationalities win their freedom; to proclaim and promote the sovereign rights of Labour, that uncrowned but only legitimate monarch of the world'.
Counter-revolution under the Habsburg Emperor, the Russian Tsar and the King of Prussia had destroyed the national liberation movements of 1848 and 1849 and brought Hungary, Poland and Italy once again under alien rule. In the subject nations, the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie, as well as the workers, struggled for freedom against foreign domination. But the aim of the aristocracy and bourgeoisie in the national liberation struggle was limited to national independence, with no suggestion of social or democratic reforms. 'Our further duty is to restore the oppressed nations to independence,' continued Jones. 'But what independence? Independence from the aristocrat and the usurer within, as well as the Tsar or Emperor without. Better no Poland than a royalist or aristocratic one.'
Then Jones explained the social significance of national liberation movements. 'For us, nation is nothing, man is all,' he declared. 'For us the oppressed nationalities form but one: the universal poor of every land, that struggle for life against the nation of the rich, that mighty race of which every man gives health, labour, life unto society.…We begin tonight no mere crusade against an aristocracy. We are not here to pull one tyranny down only that another may live the stronger. We are against the tyranny of capital as well.'[8]
Chief among the refugees' organizations in England which had contributed to the foundation of the International Committee was the Commune Révolutionnaire. It had been formed soon after Louis Napoleon's coup d'état by Félix Pyat, a left-republican member of the French National Assembly, in 1848. To this body belonged left-wing Radical republicans, Blanquists and Socialists, including G. Jourdain, Alfred Talandier and Alexander Besson, all of whom later joined the General Council of the First International. The Commune Révolutionnaire was in touch with revolutionary secret societies in France, with the German Communist Workers' Educational Society in London, with the Union of Polish Socialists and with the Chartists. They had a propaganda organ in L'Homme, published by Victor Hugo in Jersey and disseminated secretly from there in France.
The International Committee held weekly business meetings; in the tradition of the Fraternal Democrats it organized, together with the Socialist refugee organizations, international rallies to commemorate revolutionary activities. One such meeting held with the Commune Révolutionnaire on 22 September 1855 had an unexpected outcome. Félix Pyat had read out an 'Open Letter' to Queen Victoria, which denounced the misdeeds of Louis Napoleon in scathing terms and protested against England's being allied to the usurper. The letter, which appeared in L'Homme, was criticized by The Times. This provoked vehement attacks by English Conservatives on the French revolutionary immigrants. The government accordingly ordered the expulsion from Jersey of three men associated with L'Homme and the arrest of a Polish refugee for distributing the 'Open Letter' as a leaflet. Victor Hugo, after issuing a manifesto protesting against the expulsion of his colleagues, demonstratively left Jersey for the neighbouring island of Guernsey. Hugo was the most outstanding of the French refugees. When after Napoleon's coup d'état he had sought asylum in England, he had been warmly welcomed by English liberals and radicals. These sections of opinion were now appalled by this gross violation of the right of asylum. Edward Miall, the Liberal M.P., called a protest meeting in St Martin's Hall on 12 November at which Ernest Jones made a passionate speech. He published the 'Open Letter' in his People's Paper, and the International Committee distributed it as a leaflet. In response to a number of protest meetings, the government stopped its persecution of French refugees and released the arrested Pole.
At the beginning of April 1856 a deputation of French workers arrived in London to deliver an 'Address from the workers of France to their brothers, the workers of England'. They were delegates of a Paris organization, inspired by Proudhon's doctrine of co-operative Socialism. Their address proposed the formation of a 'League of Workers of all Nations', aimed at superseding capitalism by the development of producers' and consumers' co-operative societies. O'Brian welcomed the proposal. He took the chair at a public meeting which decided to send a message of thanks from the British workers to the French workers. A provisional committee was set up with the intention of calling into existence a genuine workers' International. But then nothing happened.
Yet the idea of a workers' International suggested by the French seems to have stimulated the International Committee to form one themselves. A few weeks later, at its first annual conference, the Committee considered transforming itself into an International Association. At a meeting on 10 August 1856, held in conjunction with the French Commune Révolutionnaire, the new international body was established.
The resolution passed at this meeting declared that the French Commune Révolutionnaire, the German Communist Workers' Educational Society, the Union of Polish Socialists and the Society of Chartists had joined together in an International Association, for mutual support in their work for the 'triumph of the universal democratic and social republic'. The four organizations further pledged themselves to 'promote among the people of all nations the organization of national socialist and revolutionary associations; to weld them by all available means into one general association so that international propaganda may from the power of unity…derive great gains, so that they could prepare for future revolution. That success was denied them in the past, because they ignored and made no use of the law of solidarity without which neither the individual nor the nation could be emancipated.'
The structure of the International Association was taken over from the Fraternal Democrats and was adopted in its turn by the First International. The Council of the Association, known as the Central International Committee, consisted of five delegates each representing an affiliated national organization. London was the seat of the central committee, which had the responsibility of convening an annual general meeting, to which it submitted a report on its activity. Any ten members—a décurie—could form a local branch. The membership fee was 6d a year.[9]
Lehning's account of the Association contains the names of a number of Germans active on the Central Committee. They included Bernard Becker, who later worked with Lassalle and, after the latter's death, was for a short time president of his General Association of German Workers; Hugo Hillmann, later a delegate from Elberfeld-Barmen and Solingen to the foundation congress of the German General Workers' Association at Leipzig; and A. Scherzer, a friend of Weitling and former member of the Paris branch of the Communist League. Rothstein, who reconstructed the history of the association from the files of the émigré Press, found Schapper, Lessner and Wilhelm Liebknecht as speakers at nearly all its public meetings. The Polish Socialists, organized in the Polish Revolutionary Society, were represented in the association by Louis Oborski, Zeno Swietoslaski and Henryk Abicht. Jourdain, Talandier and François-David Lardaux, later a member of the French section of the First International, belonged to the French group.
Records of the International Association's activities are scanty. From June 1857 a bulletin edited by Talandier appeared in German, French, English and Polish. It lasted only a year. There were American branches of the Association in New York, Boston, Cincinnati and Chicago. The German Communist League of New York, established in 1857 under the leadership of Marx's friend F. A. Sorge, was affiliated to the Association. (When in 1872 the General Council transferred its seat from London to New York, Sorge became its secretary.) In London and also in New York meetings were held to celebrate revolutionary activities. The last such meeting of which a report is available took place on 24 June 1859 with Lessner and Schapper as speakers.
Prior to this, the International Association had issued two significant manifestoes. The first, 'To the Republicans, Democrats and Socialists of Europe', which appeared in English and French in December 1858, was a reply to Mazzini.
Giuseppe Mazzini (1805–72), leader of the secret democratic and unitarian movement in the Italian states, was a formidable revolutionary figure.[10] He inspired the rising in Piedmont in 1833; he organized a revolutionary expedition from France and Switzerland into Savoy; he had a hand in the revolutionary revolts in the Abruzzi in 1841; in Romagna in 1843; in Calabria in 1844; and again in Romagna in 1845. He was an inspiration of the nationalist revolutionary movements in Poland under the domination of Tsarist Russia and in Hungary under the domination of the Habsburg Empire. He was the champion of all oppressed nationalities. The causes of Croatia, Bohemia, Greece he embraced and defended, just as he defended the cause of the unity of Germany—divided as it was into scores of tyrannical kingdoms and principalities—along with the cause of the unity of Italy. He founded the secret association of 'Young Italy' in 1832, and he laid out the constitution of the 'League of Young Europe' in 1834, an association designed to link the peoples of the various European nations together in a common crusade against the Holy Alliance, as a 'challenge to the Old Europe of the kings'. He was hounded by the police and government of many a state and was more than once laid under the sentence of death. In despair Metternich complained about him: 'I fought against the greatest soldier of our time; I succeeded in uniting Emperors and Kings, Tsar, Sultan and Pope. But there was no man on earth who made things so difficult for me as that brigand of an Italian, lean, pale, in rags—yet eloquent, like a tempest; ardent, like an apostle; impudent, like a thief; insolent, like a comedian; unrelenting, like a lover; and that man was Giuseppe Mazzini!'
Mazzini's social thought, influenced by Sismondi and Lamennais, was coloured by a vague humanitarian, religious Socialism.[11] Yet he rejected firmly the theory of the class struggle and subordinated the social inspirations of the proletariat under the national and democratic aspirations of oppressed people.
Thus, in 1858, he issued a manifesto appealing to the Democrats and Socialists of Europe not to impede the fight for a union of European republics by raising the 'social question', but rather to join forces with the middle class in one democratic organization.
The manifesto of the International Association rejected Mazzini's suggestion of a united front with the bourgeoisie. That class, it declared, wished to overthrow the monarchy merely, as in France in 1848, to replace it with a republic ruled by an oligarchy. The workers, however, had not forgotten 1848. They still remembered the terrible days of June, when the bourgeoisie of Paris had had the workers massacred in the streets. If it came to a revolution, the manifesto continued, the workers would take up arms as one man—but for their own ends, not those of the bourgeoisie. The International Association, it concluded, strove to unite the working class on the basis of Socialism and aimed at a social instead of a purely political revolution.[12]
The second and last manifesto of the Association, appearing in the spring of 1859, was a comment on the war between Austria and France which was being fought out in Lombardy. It said that the working class had no interest in purely political conflicts between nations. National unification and independence did not by themselves bring freedom to the workers. As long as the existing social system survived, there could be no real freedom.
Meanwhile, at the beginning of January 1859, the International Association had split. The Polish Revolutionary Society had withdrawn, apparently in protest against the anti-Mazzini manifesto. The Central Committee then dissolved, being replaced by a new Central Committee formed in March and to which the Poles were re-affiliated. There were no further reports of activities from the now feeble organization, apart from the manifesto on the Franco-Austrian War and the public meeting on 24 June 1859, referred to above.
*
The International Association was the last precursor of the historic International. The feeling that the oppressed peoples of the world should join forces on an international scale had sprung directly from the ideas of the French Revolution of 1789, in particular the great central idea of the rights of all men to freedom and equality. It inspired the first political movement of the working class in England—the Corresponding Societies; and the first Socialist movement in France—Babeuf's Conspiracy of the Equals. After the years of reaction it revived once again in the form of Blanqui's Society of the Seasons, the League of the Just, the Communist League, the Society of Fraternal Democrats, the International Committee and, finally, the International Association. The idea of international solidarity among the politically enslaved, in the tradition of Thomas Paine and handed on through generations of Englishmen, developed under Babeuf's influence into the idea of international solidarity among the socially and economically enslaved—the idea of international proletarian solidarity. And from the international, Socialist, secret societies in France and Germany there developed the Fraternal Democrats, which already in the mid 1840s assumed the shape of a public international working-class movement. The International Committee and its offshoot, the International Association, were only reincarnations of the historic International which, five years after the end of the International Association, started life under the name of the International Working Men's Association.
1. Minutes of the General Council, 4 May 1869.
2. John Saville, Ernest Jones, Chartist (London, 1952), p. 39. For a short but very sympathetic account of Jones's life, see Cole, Chartist Portraits.
3. Saville, op. cit., p. 66.
4. Marx-Engels Briefwechsel, vol. IV, p. 181.
5. For the complete text of this rather lengthy letter, see Saville, op. cit., pp. 274–5.
6. Kingsley Martin in The Triumph of Lord Palmerston describes the popular pressure which forced England to undertake the Crimean War against Russia.
7. For a documented account of the origin and history of the Association, see A. Müller-Lehning, 'The International Association, 1855–9', International Review of Social History, vol. III (1938).
8. Saville, op. cit., pp. 58–9.
9. For the Statutes of the International Association, see Müller-Lehning, op. cit., pp. 263–6
10. For his life and thought, see Bolton King, Mazzini (London, 1903).
11. For Mazzini's social thought, see King, op. cit., pp. 283–95; Cole, op. cit., pp. 281–5; Ignazio Silone, The Living Thought of Mazzini (London, 1939), pp. 26–32.
12. For the text of the manifesto, see Müller-Lehning, op. cit., pp. 274–80.