Secret History of ’The International’ Working Men’s Association

Beneath the banner of ’universal brotherhood’ gathered not the salt of the earth, but a drifting substratum of Europe’s political underworld-exiles without country, thinkers without readers, zealots without gods. In this unsparing account, first published in 1872, Onslow Yorke guides the reader through the mean estaminets, brasseries, cellars, garrets, lodging rooms, and print shops where ’The International’ first stirred: fetid dens of smoke and spittle-flecked oratory, where revolution was plotted like sacrament and every man’s enemy sat within earshot. Far from the rhetoric of uplift, Yorke uncovers a world of intrigue and factional spite, where the language of emancipation masked envy, truculence, and paranoia. The dramatis personae emerge not from workshops, but from the age’s margins-autodidacts with messianic visions, serial conspirators fuelled by grievance, and men who mistook destruction for destiny. Their meetings resembled séance rituals: damp, joyless, and rife with recrimination, presided over by figures who spoke always of the people, yet never seemed to know anyone normal. Yorke’s tone is ironic and amusingly unflattering, and his Secret History-herein presented in an illustrated edition-the anatomy of a fungoid growth on the timber of post-1848 Europe. One that stubbornly persists and might never go away.