These are the common U.S. lyrics to “The Internationale,” which was written in 1871 by the Communard poet Eugène Pottier after the fall of the Paris Commune.1 Pottier, born in 1816, was one of the revolutionary Parisian artisans of 1848, an admirer of Proudhon, a friend of Courbet, a leader in the Paris Commune who subsequently went into exile in the United States. His poem was set to music in 1888 by a member of a Lille workers’ chorus, Pierre Degeyter. By 1910, it had been adopted as the anthem of the international workers’ movement. It later served as an anthem of the Soviet Union, but it has been translated into many languages and sung around the world. It was banned in many parts of the world in the early years of the century; it was sung by Wobblies in the Lawrence textile strike and by the International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War; and it was the source of Frantz Fanon’s most famous title.
