On the evening of September 28, 1864, workers, trade-union leaders and political exiles crowded into St Martin’s Hall in London. They had not come with one doctrine or one national program. They came because industrial Europe had created problems—wages, hours, migration, repression and war—that no local association could address alone. Before the meeting ended, they had created the body later known as the First International.
Part of the September 28 Today in History edition. Explore more in Major Historical Events.
London as a meeting place
Mid-Victorian London was a capital of empire, commerce and political exile. British trade unions had grown stronger among skilled workers, while refugees from failed revolutions carried arguments from France, Italy, Germany and Poland. The January Uprising against Russian rule in Poland had produced large solidarity meetings. British and French workers had also made contacts during the 1862 International Exhibition.
St Martin’s Hall, a large public venue in Long Acre, could hold the international audience these connections produced. The founding meeting was called to welcome French delegates and express cross-border solidarity. Reports identify English trade unionists, French mutualists, Italian republicans, German socialists and other émigrés. They shared no settled vocabulary for socialism and did not agree on the role of elections, unions, cooperatives or revolution.
The meeting of September 28
Speakers described the condition of labor and the need for international cooperation. The assembly agreed to form an association and appointed a provisional committee to organize it. That decision—not a finished constitution or a single founding speech—was the institutional act of the evening. The name International Working Men’s Association soon appeared in English; “First International” was a later label used to distinguish it from successor organizations.
Karl Marx attended as one of the German representatives, but he was not the meeting’s sole organizer and did not dominate the platform. His importance came immediately afterward. The provisional committee asked for an address and rules. Marx drafted texts that could hold together constituencies with incompatible theories while giving the new organization a durable political language.
An address broad enough to unite
The Inaugural Address reviewed working-class experience since the failed revolutions of 1848. It contrasted industrial growth with persistent poverty, praised the campaign for the ten-hour working day and treated the cooperative movement as proof that workers could organize production differently. It ended with a call for workers to participate in politics and international affairs.
The provisional rules declared that the emancipation of the working classes must be achieved by the working classes themselves. That formulation became one of the association’s defining statements. Yet the rules avoided imposing a complete Marxist program. The new International needed British trade unionists interested in practical gains, French followers of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon who favored mutualism, Italian republicans associated with Giuseppe Mazzini and other currents that distrusted one another.
A network rather than a single party
The International established a General Council in London and encouraged sections in different countries. Its congresses—Geneva in 1866, Lausanne in 1867, Brussels in 1868 and Basel in 1869—debated strikes, cooperative production, land, political action and war. Delegates did not create a centrally commanded world party. They built a communications network that circulated resolutions, reports and appeals among labor movements developing at different speeds.
That network could make local disputes international. Employers sometimes recruited workers across borders to defeat strikes; activists tried to prevent such movements from becoming strikebreaking. Messages of support and collections of money gave workers evidence that their conflict was being watched elsewhere. The practical capacity was limited, but the idea that capital operated internationally and labor should answer internationally gained organizational form.
The Paris Commune and a widening split
The Franco-Prussian War and the Paris Commune of 1871 changed the International’s public reputation. After French government forces crushed the Commune, Marx wrote The Civil War in France for the General Council. Governments and newspapers across Europe associated the International with revolution, sometimes crediting it with directing events it had not controlled. Repression increased while membership and notoriety were difficult to measure.
Internal conflict sharpened as well. Marx and allies argued that working-class organization required political action. Mikhail Bakunin and anti-authoritarian federalists opposed centralized authority and rejected the conquest of state power as a path to emancipation. At the Hague Congress in 1872, the split became open. Bakunin and James Guillaume were expelled, and the General Council was moved to New York. The transfer weakened the organization; it was formally dissolved in 1876.
What the International achieved
Measured as a permanent organization, the First International was brief and fractured. Measured as an experiment, it was foundational. It gave activists a forum for asking how workers in different legal systems and political cultures could coordinate. It made arguments about class, internationalism, unions and political action travel through a common institution.
Its diversity is essential to the story. The association was never simply “Marx’s organization,” even though Marx shaped its best-known documents and strategic debates. Trade unionists, mutualists, collectivists, republicans and anarchists all belonged to its history. The conflicts that broke it apart also defined later labor and socialist movements.
Why September 28 matters
The founding meeting shows institutions being created before their members know what they will become. The people in St Martin’s Hall agreed first on a problem: workers faced forces that crossed borders. They created a committee and only then fought over program, structure and strategy.
That sequence explains the International’s strength and fragility. Breadth made the association possible; breadth also made durable unity difficult. Its most lasting inheritance was not a headquarters or a single platform. It was the proposition that workers’ political and economic lives belonged to an international field.
The labor world behind the hall
Industrial growth had concentrated workers in cities while employers and goods moved across regions and borders. Skilled British unions had won organization and bargaining strength, but legal protections remained incomplete and many workers stood outside stable trades. In France, the Second Empire allowed limited worker delegations and associations while policing political opposition. Exiles in London connected these unequal national environments.
Economic crises and strikes made international competition concrete. An employer could recruit labor from another country; a defeated strike in one place could depress expectations elsewhere. Support across borders was therefore not only moral rhetoric. It could involve warning workers about strikebreaking, collecting funds and publicizing repression. The International tried to make those improvised practices regular.
How the General Council functioned
The London-based General Council corresponded with sections, issued addresses and tried to mediate disputes about affiliation and representation. It had moral and informational influence but limited power to command. Membership numbers reported by supporters and enemies were often exaggerated. The association’s reach varied sharply by country, and a local group might identify with the International without a strong administrative relationship to London.
This loose structure helped the association expand but complicated discipline. Translation itself was political: terms such as “collective property,” “political action” and “federation” carried different meanings among traditions. Congress resolutions recorded majorities, not a unified worldview. The documents are most useful when read as evidence of debate rather than as a single doctrine obeyed everywhere.
Internationalism and its limits
The International opposed wars waged for dynastic or ruling-class interests and encouraged workers to recognize shared interests across national lines. Yet its members were not free of nationalism, colonial assumptions or racial prejudice. Its strongest organization remained European and North Atlantic, even as the world economy it criticized was imperial and global.
Women participated in labor movements and some sections, but the association’s language and leadership reflected nineteenth-century gender exclusions. Debates over women’s work exposed divisions between advocates of equality and those who imagined male breadwinners as the basis of social reform. A complete history must preserve both the expansion of solidarity and the boundaries its founders did not overcome.
Later internationals inherited the name but not a single uninterrupted organization. The Second International, founded in 1889, connected socialist parties and helped establish May Day as an international workers’ observance. The Communist International, created in 1919, operated under very different revolutionary and state conditions. Calling the 1864 association the “First” International imposes a family tree that participants at St Martin’s Hall could not yet see.
Its documents nevertheless supplied later movements with durable phrases and disputes. The claim that workers must emancipate themselves challenged reform granted solely from above. Arguments over political parties, unions, federalism and central councils reappeared in new settings. The International mattered not because it settled those questions, but because it created a transnational arena in which they became shared problems.
The physical setting did not survive unchanged. St Martin’s Hall was damaged by fire in 1860, restored, and later converted for theatrical use before the site was redeveloped. What survives most securely is the paper trail: addresses, rules, minutes, correspondence and hostile surveillance. Those sources reveal an institution assembled through committees and translations, not born fully formed in a single dramatic speech.
