In the last month before the Haymarket Riot, Chicago's labor movement staged two grand demonstrations as it prepared to inaugurate the Eight Hour Day on May 1. The Knights of Labor and the Trade and Labor Assembly arranged the first on April 10, the International Working Peoples' Association (IWPA) and the Central Labor Union (CLU) arranged the second, two weeks later, on Easter Sunday, April 25. The two demonstrations shared a common purpose—to rally the city's labor movement around shorter hours—but they could not have been more different.

Over the course of one hundred years Haymarket has provoked a considerable body of personal and historical writing offering a variety of interpretations and evaluations of its meaning. Thus historians have attributed to Haymarket local as well as national significance; they have viewed it as a conspiracy by the ruling elite against the labor movement, as a death-blow to anarchism in the United States, as an attempt at weakening the eight-hour movement, and as a critical watershed for the organization of American labor at large. Before adding yet another view, it may be appropriate to address not only one basic issue underlying any such endeavor but also the assumptions for attributing to this unique historical event important and far-reaching consequences. Claims about Haymarket's wide ramifications certainly cannot be sustained by dealing with it solely on the factual level; such an attempt could justifiably be criticized as a simplistic and reductionistic “cause-and-effect” explanation.

This is a tale of two cities: Chicago and Paris. They were different worlds, one the gem of western Europe, the other the gem of the prairies, yet both had a working-class movement in the 1870s and 1880s that produced a unique set of historical events which have served a symbolic function of communicating between one side of the globe and another. To illustrate these events as they appeared to one continent from the other I will begin with Chicago and demonstrate how the Paris Commune served as a symbolic event which gave meaning to local political struggles in the Windy City. Then, as the Haymarket Affair of 1886 unfolds, I will shift to Paris and the left-wing press as it tried to translate Chicago events into something meaningful for French workers. If these were the best of times and worst of times for workers in the late nineteenth century, then it is worth exploring the uses of these events in the creation of a working-class language of internationalism.

When the Statue of Liberty, a gift of the French government to the American Republic, was inaugurated in the New York harbor on October 28, 1886, the French radical press felt that the ceremony, held as it was on the eve of the executions of the Chicago martyrs, was more of an insult to labor than a tribute to freedom. Indeed, the French anarchists suggested that this statue should be renamed “the Goddess of Murder.” Was this just an outburst of anarchist rhetoric or does it tell us something about the depth of feeling created in the European radical movement by the dramatic events that marked the year 1886?

One day after the execution of the Haymarket anarchists, the German Social Democratic leader August Bebel penned a terse commentary to his friend Friedrich Engels: “So in Chicago the execution has been carried out. Abominable (scheusslich). This murder will have the best consequences for the movement. It will bring the anarchists to their senses while again revealing the class state in its nakedness to the workers and destroying any illusions. Such excesses must occur if things are to advance more quickly.”

At least one excellent new book has been published to mark the centenary of the Haymarket riot of May 4, 1886, which resulted in the death of eight policemen and the wounding of many others, and the arrest and conviction of eight anarchists in one of the worst miscarriages of justice in American history.

Paul Avrich's recent work represents a major advance over the only other previous book-length assessment, whichwas written by Henry David fifty years ago, and was based almost entirely on secondary sources. Avrich's meticulous account confirms that it was the Chicago police who precipitated the violence at the meeting, which had been called to protest the fatal shooting of several strikers at the McCormick Harvester factory the previous day.