The Internationale

The Internationale appears in the novel as both a song heard among a crowd and a refrain woven through a newsreel collage. Its recurrence links collective action in the streets of Paris with a meeting in New York supporting Russia’s workers, giving the song a role in the book’s portrayal of revolutionary solidarity across borders.

Form and Recurrence

The song enters the text in fragments rather than as a single, self-contained performance. In the Paris sequence, portions of its lyrics are set among images of crowds, clashes with police, and political headlines. The repeated returns make the song more than background sound: it supplies a continuing verbal thread through material that otherwise jumps rapidly between places and events.

The fragments include the song’s description of a final struggle and its appeal to those suffering deprivation. Later lines evoke a last conflict in which people take their places together, ending with an image of the international party as the human race. The shifts between these passages broaden the song’s scope from immediate hardship to an imagined collective future. The text does not pause to explain the song; its meaning accumulates through where it recurs and what it is set beside.

Paris: A Song in the Street Montage

The Paris material places The Internationale amid a sequence of public disorder. At Place de la Concorde, Republican Guards ride among the crowd. At République, demonstrators oppose the guards, and the scene moves through stones, scraps of the song, and calls for barricades. These details establish a contested public space in which political speech, crowd action, and state force occupy the same streets.

At Gare de l’Est, the crowd sings the song in full as the gendarmerie advances. The narrative then follows the disruption into adjoining streets: people flee, a narrator encounters a friend who warns that the police are shooting, and the two take shelter in a café. When they later look outside, the street has emptied, leaving scattered objects and a torn handbill. The song’s appearance at the station thus belongs to a larger scene of collective assembly and dispersal, rather than to a separate musical interlude.

The newsreel sequence that follows returns to the song in brief lyric passages, intercut with headlines about political violence, arrests, and economic gain. One item reports a gunfight in a legislature; another concerns the arrest of YMCA workers, while later headlines describe action against California workers and claim that Bolshevism is about to collapse. Between such items, the song’s language of shared struggle and a united human future offers a counterpoint to the newsreel’s fragmented reports. The collage does not resolve the contradictions between those reports and the song’s hopes; it places them together for the reader to confront.

New York Meeting and Political Solidarity

The song also appears outside the Paris montage, at a meeting in the Empire Casino in the Bronx. The gathering has been organized to send greetings from American workers to the workers’ government in Russia. Federal agents sit in the front row with a stenographer, police close the doors after the first few hundred people enter, and people outside are being dispersed. In the hall, the chairman’s announcement of the meeting’s purpose is met with cheering; those outside cheer as well, and a group can be heard singing The Internationale.

The song’s presence connects the meeting inside the casino to the crowd outside, even as police activity and surveillance bear down on both. Ben Compton speaks about capitalist governments driving people into a war that benefits bankers and munitions makers, and several speakers are arrested. Men of conscription age are required to show their registration cards before leaving. These events give the song’s collective language a specific political setting: it is heard at a gathering whose stated aim is solidarity with workers abroad, while authorities monitor and restrict the assembly.

Significance in the Novel

Across these appearances, The Internationale binds together a street crowd in Paris, a newsreel’s rapid movement across political events, and a workers’ meeting in New York. The settings differ, but in each, the song is associated with people acting or assembling collectively under pressure. In the Paris sequence, it accompanies a confrontation and dispersal; in the Bronx, it is audible as a meeting of solidarity proceeds under surveillance and ends in arrests.

The newsreel’s repeated fragments also give the song a structural function. Headlines break events into short, often conflicting items; the song returns between them with a language of common struggle and collective purpose. That contrast does not establish that the promised unity has been achieved. Instead, the song holds open the possibility of solidarity across national boundaries while the surrounding scenes show the obstacles confronting it. Its recurrence therefore makes internationalism audible within a narrative crowded with local conflicts, repression, and competing accounts of political change.