The Daily Cartoon and Live Briefing: Thursday, May 1, 2025

Notably: The original Internationale is the fabulous anthem written by the Paris Communard Eugène Pottier in 1871 soon after he escaped ending among the 15,000 of his co-communards massacred by the French army after the two-month Commune, the last true revolution on French soil. Pottier meant his Internationale to be sung to the tune of the Marseillaise, an equally fabulous anthem. And so it was at Pottier’s burial in Paris in 1887, attended by 10,000 mourners at the great Père Lachaise Cemetery. He’d spent a few years in exile in, of all places, New Jersey, before that understandably proved worse than the Commune (he’d have had better luck across the rivers in Queens). So he returned to France and died. He’d written the lyrics to the Internationale after attending the Karl Marx-led workers’ congress of 1864. But eventually the anthem was set to music written by another Frenchman, Pierre DeGeyter (no relation, alas), a laborer from Lille, on a commission by that city’s mayor (not a Norris). And so the anthem evolved. It’s still as rousing as they come, like the Marseillaise. Unfortunately, the Soviets appropriated it in one of the great crimes of appropriation of the past century and a half. Ever since it’s been associated with the Soviet regime, if you could even call a government of gulags a regime–a terrible injustice to the lyrics and the music. Then again, Beethoven wrote the Eroica (his Third Symphony) to celebrate Napoleon, only to realize what a mass murderer he was. We still listen to the Eroica but disassociate it from Napoleon, and if there is to be a more accurate Beethoven  on Napoleon, it’s the Seventh, with its mournful, elegiac second movement, its beats in rhythm to a procession at Pere Lachaise. The Internationale should be reclaimed. It’s as true as ever, beyond its Soviet enchainment. Back to John Reed. Back to Diane Keaton’s smile (oh, the seductions of romanticism that keep leading so many billions astray. Blame Rousseau, even–and especially–for Communism’s genocides. Give me deism, give me Enlightenment any day). And it is May 1. The one real Labor Day.

—P.T.