The Internationale

"The Internationale" (french: "L'Internationale", italic=no, ) is an international anthem used by various communist and socialist groups; currently, it serves as the official anthem of the Communist Party of China. It has been a standard of the socialist movement since the late nineteenth century, when the Second International adopted it as its official anthem. The title arises from the "First International", an alliance of workers which held a congress in 1864. The author of the anthem's lyrics, Eugène Pottier, a Marxist.

It is one of the most universally translated anthems in history.

It has been adopted as the anthem of the anarchist, communist, socialist, democratic socialist, and social democratic movements.

French version

The original French lyrics were written in June 1871 by Eugène Pottier) and were originally intended to be sung to the tune of "La Marseillaise".
However, the melody to which it is usually sung was composed in 1888 by Pierre De Geyter for the choir "La Lyre des travailleurs" of the French Worker's Party in his hometown of Lille, and the first performed there in July of that year.
DeGeyter had been commissioned to do this for the choir by , the mayor of Lille.

There is an early edition of the song, predating the final 1887 version; it was published in 1990 by Robert Brécy.
Contemporary editions published by Boldoduc (Lille) in 1888, by Delory in 1894, and by Lagrange in 1898 are no longer locatable.

Pottiers's lyrics contain one-liners that became very popular and found widespread use as slogans; other lines ("Ni Dieu, ni César, ni tribun") were already well-known in the workers' movement. The success of the song is connected to the stability and widespread popularity of the Second International. Like the lyrics, the music by Degeyter was relatively simple and down to earth, suitable for a workers' audience.

French lyrics, 1887 version

Authorship and copyright

In a successful attempt to save Pierre De Geyter's job as a woodcarver, the 6,000 leaflets printed by Lille printer Boldoduc only mentioned the French version of his family name (Degeyter).
The second edition published by Delory named Pierre's brother Adolphe as the composer.
With neither money nor representation, Pierre De Geyter lost his first lawsuit over this in 1914 and did not gain legal recognition of authorship until 1922 when he was 74.
His brother had in the meantime died by suicide in 1916, leaving a note to Pierre explaining the fraud and stating that Delory had manipulated him into claiming authorship; and Delory had inscribed on Adolphe's tombstone "Ici repose Adolphe Degeyter, l'auteur de ''L'Internationale''".
Despite this dying declaration, historians in the 1960s such as Daniel Ligou were still contending that Adolphe was the author.

In 1972 "Montana Edition", owned by , bought the rights to the song for 5,000 Deutschmark, first for the territory of West Germany, then in East Germany, then worldwide. East Germany paid Montana Edition 20,000 DM every year for its rights to play the music. Pierre De Geyter died in 1932, causing the copyrights to expire in 2002. Luckhardt's German text is the public domain since 1984.

As the "Internationale" music was published before 1 July 1909 outside the United States, it is in the public domain in the United States. As of 2013, Pierre De Geyter's music is also in the public domain in countries and areas whose copyright durations are authors' lifetime plus 80 years or less. Due to France's wartime copyright extensions (''prorogations de Guerre''), SACEM claimed that the music was still copyrighted in France until October 2014. Because of this, the "Internationale" is also in the public domain within France.

As Eugène Pottier died in 1887, his original French lyrics are in the public domain. Gustave Delory once acquired the copyright of his lyrics through the songwriter G. B. Clement having bought it from Pottier's widow.

Anthem of the Soviet Union

The Russian version was initially translated by Arkady Kots in 1902 and printed in London in '' Zhizn'', a Russian émigré magazine. The first Russian version consisted of three stanzas (as opposed to six stanzas in the original French lyrics and based on stanzas 1, 2, and 6) and the refrain. After the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, the text was slightly re-worded to get rid of "now useless" future tenses – particularly the refrain was reworded (the future tense was replaced by the present, and the first person plural possessive pronoun was introduced). In 1918, the chief editor of ''Izvestia'', Yuri Steklov, appealed to Russian writers to translate the other three stanzas and in the end, the song was expanded into six stanzas.

The full song is as follows:

Toscanini and ''Hymn of the Nations''

The change of the Soviet Union's national anthem from "The Internationale" to the "State Anthem of the USSR" was a factor in the production of the 1944 movie '' Hymn of the Nations'', which made use of an orchestration of "The Internationale" that Arturo Toscanini had already done the year before for a 1943-11-07 NBC radio broadcast commemorating the twenty-sixth anniversary of the October Revolution.
It was incorporated into Verdi's '' Inno delle nazioni'' alongside the national anthems of the United Kingdom (already in the original) and the United States (incorporated by Toscanini for a prior radio broadcast of the ''Inno'' in January of that year) to signify the side of the Allies during World War Two.

Toscanini's son Walter remarked that an Italian audience for the movie would see the significance of Arturo being willing to play these anthems and unwilling to play ''Giovinezza'' and the ''Marcia Reale'' because of his anti-Fascist political views.
Alexandr Hackenschmied, the film's director, expressed his view that the song was "ormai archeologico" (nearly archaeological), but this was a countered in a letter by Walter Toscanini to Giuseppe Antonio Borgese, rejecting the objections of Borgese, Hackenschmied, and indeed the Office of War Information.
At the time, Walter stated that he believed that "The Internationale" had widespread relevance across Europe, and in 1966 he recounted in correspondence that the OWI had "panicked" when it had learned of the Soviet Union's plans, but Arturo had issued an ultimatum that if "The Internationale", "l'inno di tutte le glebe ed i lavoratori di tutto il mondo" (the anthem of the working classes of the whole world) was not included, that if the already done orchestration and performance were not used as-is, then they should forget about distributing the film entirely.

The inclusion of "The Internationale" in the Toscanini's minds was not simply for the sake of a Soviet Union audience, but because of its relevance to all countries of the world.
Although Walter did not consider "The Internationale" to be "good music", he considered it to be (as he stated to the OWI) "more than the hymn of a nation or a party" and "an idea of brotherhood".

It would have been expensive to re-record a new performance of the ''Inno'' without "The Internationale", and it remained in the movie as originally released.
Some time during the McCarthy Era, however, it was edited out of re-released copies, and remained so until a 1988 Library of Congress release on video, which restored "The Internationale" to the movie.

Winston Churchill and ''National Anthems of the Allies''

A similar situation had occurred earlier in the War with the BBC
...