Translated: for marxists.org by Mitchell Abidor
Translator s note: Eug ne 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 R volutionnaires, 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 Lefran ais, 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
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