The Address The Civil War in France and the English Press

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London, 30 June. No publication in the history of London has caused such a stir as the Address of the General Council of the International. In the beginning, the main papers tried to kill it with silence, a favourite method of theirs; but a few days were enough to prove to them that it would not work this time. The Telegraph, Standard, Spectator, Pall Mall Gazette and Times had to bring themselves, one by one, to mention this “remarkable document” in their leaders.”

Then letters from third parties started to appear in the papers, drawing attention to this and that in particular. Then more leaders, and at the weekend the weeklies returned to it once again. The entire press has had to confess unanimously that the International is a great power in Europe to be reckoned with, which cannot be eliminated by refusing to talk about it. They all had to acknowledge the stylistic mastery with which the Address is written—a language as powerful as William Cobbett’s, according to The Spectator. It was only to be expected that this bourgeois press would attack, almost to a man, such an energetic assertion of the proletarian point of view, such a decisive justification of the Paris Commune. Likewise, that the Stieberiades fabricated by the Parisian police papers and the documents of quite a different society (Bakunin’s Alliance of Socialist Democracy) laid at the door of the International by Jules Favre would be attributed to it, despite the public disavowals of the General Council. In the meantime, however, the commotion finally became too much even for the philistine. The Daily News began to soothe, and The Examiner, the only paper to behave really decently, resolutely stood up for the International in a detailed article. Two English members of the General Council, Odger, who has long been on much too friendly terms with the bourgeoisie, and Lucraft, who seems to have grown much more concerned about the opinion of “respectable” people since he was elected on to the London School Board, were swayed by the fuss in the papers to tender their resignations, which were unanimously accepted. They have already been replaced by two other English workers and will soon mark what it means to betray the proletariat at the critical moment.

An English parson, Llewellyn Davies, lamented in The Daily News about the abuse directed at Jules Favre and consorts in the Address and expressed the desire that the truth or falsehood of these charges be ascertained, as far as I am concerned, by the French Government bringing an action against the General Council On the very next day, Karl Marx declared in the same paper that as the author of the Address he considered himself personally responsible for the charges ; however, the French Embassy does not seem to have any orders to proceed with a libel suit against him. Finally The Pall Mall Gazette then declared that this was quite unnecessary, the private character of a statesman was always sacred, and only his public actions could be attacked. Of course, if the private characters of the English statesmen were brought before the public, the Last Day of the oligarchic and bourgeois world would be nigh. An article from the Vienna Wanderer by and about the scoundrel Netschajeff has been doing the rounds of the German press, glorifying his deeds and those of Serebrennikoff and Elpidin. If this should occur again, we shall come back to this fine threesome for a closer look. For the present, suffice it to say that Elpidin is a notorious Russian spy.