Frederick Engels

The International and the “Neue”

Written on May 2, 1873.

[Der Volksstaat, No. 38, May 10, 1873]

London, 2 May 1873

The *Neue* contains in its No. 49 a lying article on the latest trials of the International in France, which will certainly have earned its author an extra *douceur* from the Reptile Fund, so thickly are the lies laid on. For the trial in Toulouse the *Neue* invokes an article from the Brussels *Internationale*; this article is itself borrowed from *La Liberté* and comes from Herr Jules Guesde, a French refugee who, since his arrival in Geneva, has joined the other would-be great men of the emigration there in lustily blowing the Bakuninist noise‑trumpet and, at the Jura Congress in Sonvillier (Nov. 1871), was among the signatories of the well‑known circular of the Jura Federation by which Herr Bakunin’s secret Alliance declared war on the public International. We shall see in a moment what role Herr Guesde played in the French International. He calls Herr Dentraygues, who in this trial had denounced his co‑defendants as members of the International, Marx’s plenipotentiary‑general and seeks to blame Marx, the General Council and the “authoritarian organisation from above” for this betrayal and for the convictions that followed.

Here are the facts.

Herr Dentraygues, a draughtsman at the railway office in Pézenas (department [Hérault]), approached the General Council on 24 Dec. 1871 with the announcement that a radical‑democratic committee, representing seven trade unions and of which he was the president, was requesting admission to the International. On 4 January the secretary for France wrote to Calas in Pézenas (now sentenced to one year), who was fully accredited by the testimony of the affiliated Social‑Democratic committee in Béziers (Hérault) – its members are likewise sentenced and were, moreover, known as reliable to various Commune members present in London. On 14 January Calas issued a certificate of reliability for Dentraygues, stated that he had come to an understanding with him, “we will work hand in hand”. In March Dentraygues moved his residence to Toulouse; he had thus been active there for a full nine months before his arrest, and, far from complaining about him, the Toulouse Internationalists had constantly lived in harmony with him and confirmed this by unanimously electing him on 18 August in all four – numerous – sections as delegate to the Hague Congress. The four mandates, signed only by the committee members and group leaders, bear a total of 67 signatures. If, therefore, the General Council appointed this man as its plenipotentiary for Toulouse and the surrounding area, it thereby merely gave expression to the wish of the local members themselves.

Now to Herr Guesde.

On 18 August 1872 the Montpellier section informed the General Council that Herr Paul Brousse, a correspondent and friend of Herr Guesde, was trying to provoke a split in the section there; he demanded that the members should not pay the agreed contributions to the travelling expenses of the Toulouse delegate, indeed should do nothing at all until the Hague Congress had decided. For this reason, Herr Brousse had been expelled from the section; it demanded that the General Council expel him from the International. The letter was signed by Calas and three others. The General Council knew that Herr Brousse was intriguing there in the interest of the secessionists of the Jura Federation, but considered it superfluous to attach any further importance to the young man – he was a medical student – and let him run. Herr Guesde, then in Rome, wrote a report to *La Liberté* at the beginning of October, in which he denounces the perfectly natural action of the Montpellier section as “authoritarian”; but while he designates his friend Brousse only by his initial, he has the name “Calas in Montpellier”
printed in full.
The French police did not need telling twice. A letter sent about this time by the Secretary of the General Council to Calas is immediately intercepted in the post; this letter contained much about Dentraygues; Dentraygues is arrested at once, and soon afterwards Calas too.

Who, then, was the denouncer, Dentraygues or Guesde?

If Herr Guesde further claims that the despatch of *missi dominici* [plenipotentiaries] by the General Council, the coming and going of delegates from outside, whose description is well known to the police, is the best means of betraying the International in France, he forgets:

1. that the three plenipotentiaries of the General Council in France were not world‑reformers arriving from outside, but people who lived in the places where they were accredited and were designated by the confidence of the sections themselves;

2. that the only international “delegates from outside” who appeared in the South of France last autumn and winter were sent not by the General Council but by the secessionists of the Jura Federation. These gentlemen blustered so loudly in public cafés in Toulouse etc. shortly before the arrests that the attention of the police was thereby drawn to our association; only, as everywhere and always, the real Internationals were seized while the anarchist loudmouths enjoy the special protection of the high police.

If Herr Dentraygues made a few disclosures from personal motives and out of weakness, there are sufficient grounds to prove that he was not a police spy up to his conviction. Under no circumstances have the gentlemen of the Alliance, whose co‑founder was the present Bonapartist agent Albert Richard of Lyons, any cause to cast stones at other people, and still less has the *Neue*, whose police‑ridden past and present constitute the greatest disgrace of the German labour movement.

As regards the Paris trial, it is now established that Heddeghem was a police spy. This man, appointed secretary by his section in Paris, referred to the Commune and General Council member
Ranvier,
who gave him a glowing testimonial of reliability and activity; on this basis Heddeghem was admitted. As in the first case, so in this one, the General Council had therefore taken all the precautionary measures at its disposal.

The claim that Bakunin was expelled at The Hague because he wants to “put an end to the reprehensible activities of secret conspiracies” is a new one. The commission of the Hague Congress on the Alliance, to which the statutes of this Bakuninist secret conspiracy – directed not against the governments but against the International – were submitted, came to a quite different result.

Equally new is the claim that Marx “has lived through more than a dozen Communist trials of his followers”. History knows only of the one Communist trial tried in Cologne in 1852; but the *Neue* is not paid for telling the truth. In any case, we will bear in mind its closing warning:

“The manoeuvre of the police power: in cases where it provokes a show trial, formally to convict its own secret agents as well, but later to provide them with a comfortable life in prison.”

This passage, plucked from the “life” of Herr von Schweitzer, deserves to be taken entirely to heart.

“May the workers therefore always keep their eyes open,” should the gentlemen of the *Neue* one day happen to be “formally convicted”!