The Belgian Massacres, 1869

Marx wrote this address to the workers of Europe and the United States following the bloody events in Belgium in April 1869. On April 20, the General Council heard the report of Eugen Hins, representative of the Belgian Federal Council of the International, who had been sent to the spot to investigate the details of the massacre in Seraing and Frameries. Marx was commissioned to draw up an address on behalf of the General Council to denounce the atrocities committed by the Belgian authorities. He wrote it in English and French and read it out at the General Council meeting of May 4. The Council approved the address and decided to have it printed and distributed. In English it was published as a leaflet, “The Belgian Massacres: To the Workmen of Europe and the United States”, in London on May 12, 1869. A copy of the leaflet has been preserved in the Minute Book of the General Council. Part of the leaflet was reproduced in The Bee-Hive, No. 395, May 8, 1869. The French text was published in the Belgian newspapers L’Internationale, No. 18, May 15 and La Liberté, May 16, 1869. The German translation by Eccarius was printed in Der Social-Demokrat, No. 58, May 21, in the Demokratisches Wochenblatt, No. 21, May 22, 1869 and in other newspapers in Germany, Switzerland and France. The address found a broad response among the people. Read at a mass protest meeting in Brussels on May 16, it was met with tumultuous applause.

… the quite legitimate strike of the puddlers in the Cockerill Ironworks, of Seraing, was only converted into a riot by a strong posse of cavalry and gendarmerie suddenly launched upon that place in order to provoke the people. From the 9th to the 12th of April these stout warriors not only recklessly charged with sabre and bayonet the unarmed workmen, they indiscriminately killed and wounded harmless passers-by, forcibly broke into private houses, and even amused themselves with repeated furious onslaughts on the travellers pent up in the Seraing Railway Station. When these days of horror had passed away, it became bruited about that Mr. Kamp, the mayor of Seraing, was an agent of the Cockerill Joint Stock Company, that the Belgian Home Minister, a certain Mr. Pirmez, was the largest shareholder in a neighbouring colliery also on strike, and that His Royal Highness the Prince of Flanders had invested 1 500 000 francs in the Cockerill concern. Hence people jump to the truly strange conclusion that the Seraing massacre was a sort of joint stock company coup d’État, quietly plotted between the firm Cockerill and the Belgian Home Minister, for the simple purpose of striking terror unto their disaffected subjects.