It’s a song that resembles us. “The Internationale”, song of the oppressed and song of the executioners

“The Internationale”, composed in 1888 by the workers’ activist Pierre Degeyter on a text by the revolutionary poet Eugène Pottier, carried the greatest hopes and covered up some of the greatest crimes of the 20th century by becoming the common anthem of all communist regimes and movements.

In partnership with the exhibition It’s a song that resembles us – Worldwide hits of French-language popular music At the Cité internationale de la langue française in Villers-Cotterêts, these chronicles look in detail at each of the stories presented there.

We would like to know nothing about The International that the version, with the spring violin of Stéphane Grappelli, with the accordion of Marcel Azzola, a melody which would tell us the promise of a fraternal and radiant world, as in the happy atmosphere of the film Snowy in May by Louis Malle in 1990, for which it was recorded. We would perhaps like to remember less versions like that of the hearts of the Red Army, a facade of grand spectacles and glamour in uniform, one of the most brutally criminal regimes in history.

This title The International is forever associated with the ideology that sowed the 20th, and even the 21st, century with a series of tragedies that could have caused more deaths than the two world wars combined: the mass crimes of the Soviet regime, the extermination of a third of the Cambodian population by the Khmer Rouge, the terrible upheavals of the history of the People’s Republic of China, the oppression of the peoples of Eastern Europe behind the Iron Curtain. And still, the executioners sing The International.

In this episode of It’s a song that resembles usyou hear excerpts from:

Stéphane Grappelli (BOF Snowy in May by Louis Malle), The International, 1989

Red Army Choir, The International, 1973

Bernard Demigny and the Popular Choir of Paris, The International, 1974

Henri Weber, The International, 1899

Liu Huan, The International, 2016

Summer Momoko and Tia Ray, The International, 2016

More Bifluorinated Song, The International, 1991

Stéphane Grappelli (BOF Snowy in May by Louis Malle), The International, 1989

You can also extend this column with the book It’s a song that resembles us published by Heritage Publishing.

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