The Internationale

"The Internationale" is an international anthem that has been adopted as the anthem of various anarchist, communist, socialist and social democratic movements. It has been a standard of the socialist movement since the late nineteenth century, when the Second International adopted it as its official anthem. The title arises from the "First International", an alliance of workers, which held a congress in 1864. The author of the anthem's lyrics, Eugène Pottier, a member of the French branch of the organisation, attended this congress. Pottier's text was later set to an original melody composed by Pierre De Geyter, a member of the Parti Ouvrier Français in Lille in industrial northern France.

Lyrics

The song in its original French version was written in June 1871 by Eugène Pottier, a member of the First International and Paris Commune, after the Commune had been crushed by the French army on 28 May but before Pottier fled first to Britain and then later to the United States. Pottier intended it to be sung to the tune of "La Marseillaise". The song was reputedly sung to the Marseillaise at Pottier's burial in November 1887. Only the following year, the melody to which The Internationale is usually sung, was composed by Pierre De Geyter for the choir "La Lyre des Travailleurs" of the French Worker's Party in his hometown of Lille, and the first performed there in July 1888. De Geyter had been commissioned by Gustave Delory the future mayor of Lille, who had received the text from a young socialist teacher, Charles Gros.
Pottier wrote an earlier version of the song in September 1870, to celebrate the Third Republic declared after the defeat of the Second French Empire by Prussia and the abdication of Napoleon III, and to honour the First International; this version was reprinted in 1988, the centennial of Degeyter's musical setting, by the historian of Commune song, Robert Brécy. Contemporary editions published by Boldoduc in 1888, by Delory in 1894, and by Lagrange in 1898 are no longer locatable, but the text that endures is the one authorised by Pottier for his , published by his Communard colleague Jean Allemane in April 1887, before Pottier's death in November, and reprinted in Pottier's Collected Works. This version, along with a facsimile reprint of De Geyter's score and translations into English and other languages, also appears in the only English-language selection of Pottier's works, edited by Loren Kruger.
Pottier's lyrics contain one-liners that became very popular and found widespread use as slogans; other lines such as "Ni Dieu, ni César, ni tribun" were already well known in the workers' movement. The success of the song is connected to the stability and widespread popularity of the Second International. Like the lyrics, the music by De Geyter was relatively simple and down to earth, suitable for a workers' audience.

French original

Authorship and copyright

In a successful attempt to save Pierre De Geyter's job as a woodcarver, the 6,000 leaflets printed by Lille printer Boldoduc only mentioned the French version of his family name. The second edition published by Delory named Pierre's brother Adolphe as the composer. With neither money nor representation, Pierre De Geyter lost his first lawsuit over this in 1914 and did not gain legal recognition of authorship until 1922 when he was 74. His brother had in the meantime died by suicide in 1916, leaving a note to Pierre explaining the fraud and stating that Delory had manipulated him into claiming authorship; and Delory had inscribed on Adolphe's tombstone "Ici repose Adolphe Degeyter, l'auteur de L'Internationale", SACEM claimed that the music was still copyrighted in France until October 2014. The "Internationale" is now also in the public domain within France.
As Eugène Pottier died in 1887, his original French lyrics are in the public domain. Gustave Delory once acquired the copyright of his lyrics through the songwriter Jean-Baptiste Clement having bought it from Pottier's widow.

Translations

There have been a very wide variety of translations of the anthem. In 2002, Kuznar notes that the nature of these translations has varied widely. Many have been closely literal translations with variations solely to account for rhyme and meter but others have been done to encode different ideology perspectives and or to update contents to adapt the lyrics to relevant more contemporary issues.
The first English version has been attributed to the author Eugène Pottier himself, produced apparently after he fled the fall of the Paris Commune in June 1871 for temporary exile in Britain. The first US translation was by Charles Hope Kerr who heard it in De Geyter's setting in Lille in 1894 and published it as a pamphlet that year: it was later reproduced in Songs of the IWW, first published in 1909 and has been reprinted by Kerr's publishing house into the 21st century. The first of many Italian versions signed by E. Bergeret, identified as Ettore Marroni, in 1901. The Dutch communist poet Henriette Roland Holst translated it into Dutch, with "Ontwaakt, verworpenen der aarde" at about the same time. By the time of the 1910 International Socialist Congress in Copenhagen, versions had appeared in 18 different languages, including a Danish one by A. C. Meyer, which was sung at the end of a cantata by 500 singers.

Russian version used in the Soviet Union

The Russian version was initially translated by Arkady Kots in 1902 and printed in London in Zhizn, a Russian émigré magazine. The first Russian version had only three stanzas, based on stanzas 1, 2, and 6 of the original, and the refrain. After the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, the text was slightly re-worded to get rid of "now useless" future tenses – particularly the refrain was reworded. In 1918 the chief editor of Izvestia, Yuri Steklov, appealed to Russian writers to translate the other three stanzas, which did eventually happen.
The Russian Internationale has been translated into many indigenous languages of Russia, including Tatar, Bashkir, Chuvash, Chukchi, Udmurt and Yakut.

Russian original

Literal translation

Soviet cinema and theatre

used "The Internationale" twice for the soundtrack to the 1936 Soviet film Girl Friends, once performed by a military-style band when a group of women are preparing for war, and a second time as a solo performance on a theremin.
Nikolai Evreinov's 1920 The Storming of the Winter Palace used both "The Internationale" and "La Marseillaise" symbolically in opposition to each other, with the former sung by the "Red platform" proletariat side and the latter sung by the "White platform" government side, the former starting weakly and in disarray but gradually becoming organised and drowning out the latter.

Toscanini and ''Hymn of the Nations''

The change of the Soviet Union's national anthem from "The Internationale" to the "State Anthem of the USSR" was a factor in the production of the 1944 film Hymn of the Nations, which made use of an orchestration of "The Internationale" that Arturo Toscanini had already done the year before for a 1943 NBC radio broadcast commemorating the twenty-sixth anniversary of the October Revolution.
It was incorporated into Verdi's Inno delle nazioni alongside the national anthems of the United Kingdom and the United States to signify the side of the Allies during the Second World War.
Toscanini's son Walter remarked that an Italian audience for the film would see the significance of Arturo being willing to play these anthems and unwilling to play Giovinezza and the Marcia Reale because of his anti-Fascist political views.
Alexandr Hackenschmied, the film's director, expressed his view that the song was "ormai archeologico", but this was a countered in a letter by Walter Toscanini to Giuseppe Antonio Borgese, rejecting the objections of Borgese, Hackenschmied, and indeed the Office of War Information.
At the time, Walter stated that he believed that "The Internationale" had widespread relevance across Europe, and in 1966 he recounted in correspondence that the OWI had "panicked" when it had learned of the Soviet Union's plans, but Arturo had issued an ultimatum that if "The Internationale", "l'inno di tutte le glebe ed i lavoratori di tutto il mondo" was not included, that if the already done orchestration and performance were not used as-is, then they should forget about distributing the film entirely.
The inclusion of "The Internationale" in the Toscaninis' minds was not simply for the sake of a Soviet Union audience, but because of its relevance to all countries of the world. Although Walter did not consider "The Internationale" to be "good music", he considered it to be "more than the hymn of a nation or a party" and "an idea of brotherhood".
It would have been expensive to re-record a new performance of the Inno without "The Internationale", and thus it remained in the film as originally released. Some time during the McCarthy Era, however, it was edited out of re-released copies, and remained so until a 1988 Library of Congress release on video, which restored "The Internationale" to the film.

Winston Churchill and ''National Anthems of the Allies''

A similar situation had occurred earlier in the war with the BBC's popular weekly Sunday evening radio broadcast, preceding the Nine O'Clock News, titled National Anthems of the Allies, whose playlist was all of the national anthems of the countries allied with the United Kingdom, the list growing with each country that Germany invaded. After the Germans began their invasion of the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941, it was fully expected that "The Internationale", as the anthem of the Soviet Union, would be included in the playlist that day, but to people's surprise it was not, neither that week nor the week after. Winston Churchill, a staunch opponent of communism, had immediately sent word to the BBC via Anthony Eden that "The PM has issued an instruction to the Ministry of Information that the Internationale is on no account to be played by the B.B.C.".
Newspapers such as the Daily Express and Daily Mail were sharply critical of the Foreign Office, and questions were asked in the House of Commons. The ambassador Ivan Maisky recorded in his diary a conversation with Duff Cooper on 11 July 1941 where Cooper asked him if the music played after Vyacheslav Molotov's speech on 22 June would be acceptable to the Soviet Union, and he replied that it would not be. On the evening of 13 July, the BBC instead played, in Maisky's words, "a very beautiful but little-known Soviet song", which he described as demonstrating "the British Government's cowardice and foolishness". Rather than risk offending the Soviet Union by continuing to pointedly refuse to play its national anthem in a radio programme entitled National Anthems, the BBC discontinued the programme. Six months later, on 22 January 1942, Churchill relented and lifted the prohibition.
This relaxation enabled "The Internationale" to be used in wartime broadcasts and films, and at public occasions, thereafter. The BBC's 1943 Salute to the Red Army had a mass performance of "The Internationale" at the Royal Albert Hall by the choir of the Royal Choral Society, the BBC Symphony Orchestra, the London Philharmonic Orchestra, and military bands, in front of the flag of the Soviet Union and following a speech by Anthony Eden. The day before, which was Red Army Day, troops and the audience had sung "The Internationale" to the Lord Mayor of Bristol. The 1944 film Tawny Pipit depicted schoolchildren in the fictional village of Lipton Lea welcoming the character Olga Boclova to their town by singing "The Internationale".