Rifle butts raised on high and breaking ranks. “Equals, there are no duties without rights.” We have languished long enough under domination, So that the thief should offer us his throat To Citizen Lefranςais, member of the Commune Most other translations are meant to be sung, and so radically change Pottier’s original sense. The following translation is a literal one of all the song’s stanzas. Only then that the song began its conquest of the world. That they presented it at the International Congress in Paris. The followers of Jules Guesde in the Socialist Party of France who firstĪdopted the song at the time of the Dreyfus Affair, and it was in 1900 “Marseillaise.” According to the French historian Michel Winock it was International Workers Congress in Zurich, the delegates sang the In fact, in 1893, when Engels addressed the Later by Pierre Degeyter, but did not immediately become the hymn of the Published in hisġ887 collection “Chants Révolutionnaires,” it was set to music a year Hiding from the authorities, soon to be condemned to death inĪbsentia, he wrote it while waiting to flee to London. “Internationale” just weeks after the crushing of the Paris Commune, in Translator’s note: Eugène Pottier wrote the Source: Eugène Pottier, Chants Révolutionnaires.

'No rights', says she 'without their duties, Kerr translation from the original, for The IWW Songbook (34th Edition). Our own right hand the chains must shiverĮ’er the thieves will out with their bootyĪdaptation of Charles H. We’ll shoot the generals on our own side. The Internationale unites the human race. We’ll change henceforth the old tradition He did a lot of work for the various socialist parties of the time in America, all of it in French and ran a French-language school. He only lived briefly in England, spending most of his post-Commune exile in New York, Philadelphia, and Newark. Pottier’s poem was only set to music in 1889, two years after his death, and published in 1894, and was virtually unknown until then, so it is very unlikely that he wrote an English version. Written by: Eugène Pottier, Paris, June 1871 Įugène Pottier, was a refugee from the Paris Commune, who wrote the poem while in hiding in the aftermath of the massacre of the Communards. Six versions of the the song of the international workers movement.

War in french translation