Links:
- Draft translation (pdf)
- Maitron entry on Fribourg
- Robert Graham’s site
The history of the International Workingman’s Association is obviously contested territory, with Marxist and anarchist accounts competing for attention with works, like Timothy Messer-Kruse’s very interesting account of The Yankee International, which emphasize other factions and other dynamics within the International. Of the existing histories, I am probably most partial to Robert Graham’s We Do Not Fear Anarchy, We Invoke It: The First International and the Origins of the Anarchist Movement, which strikes me as a balanced account. But I’ll admit a fascination with a number of clearly partisan accounts that manage to cover comparatively unfamiliar ground.
Ernest-Édouard Fribourg’s 1871 history of the International is certainly a partisan work. Fribourg was among the “Proudhonian” French workers who were instrumental in the founding of the IWA, but who found themselves increasingly marginalized as the organization developed. His history presents an account of an International defeated as much by Bakunin as by Marx, whose positions he rejects in terms that will undoubtedly be familiar from other histories — where, however, they are applied quite differently.
The book has been half-finished in my translation files for a number of years now, simply because it is a work without a very obvious modern audience, but as I was working recently on organizing materials for my in-progress history of mutualism, I decided that it was probably time to at least work up a draft of the rest of the text. You’ll find a draft translation linked in the sidebar. There are some formatting issues to work through when I do the revisions. The original edition is not particularly finished in that regard. But I think that those who are interested in yet another perspective on the First International will find that the draft is clean enough to work with.
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