*352 KARL MARX: A BIOGRAPHY
It was these same French followers of Proudhon who were to be the
main opponents of Marx and the General Council at the London Confer-
ence of 1865 and the Geneva and Lausanne Conferences of 1866 and
1867. It had been planned to hold the first congress of the International
in Brussels in the autumn of 1865. But Marx was anxious about the
prevailing doctrinal confusion and persuaded the General Council to call
a private conference in London to prepare the agenda carefully for a full
congress at Geneva the following year. At this conference the only two
countries represented - other than England and France - were Belgium
and Switzerland. The questions discussed were mainly organisational and
here the French delegation proposed what they called 'universal suffrage'- that all members should have the right to attend and vote at conferences.
This ultra-democratic proposal was vigorously opposed by the English
and heavily defeated. The rest of the meeting was taken up with drafting
the agenda for the future congress: here the most important debate was
on the Polish question - which had been instrumental in starting the
International and figured on the agenda of all the early congresses. Most
of the French, led by the young Belgian delegate de Paepe, opposed the
introduction of a resolution for Polish independence and against Russian
tyranny on the grounds that it would only benefit the Polish working
classes and that tyranny needed to be condemned in general. This objec-
tion was overruled by a considerable majority. The French, however, did
manage to ensure that the agenda included resolutions on the formation
of international credit societies and 'the religious idea'.^54
The Polish question was raised again in the General Council early in
1866 and an effort was made, aided by the recent establishment of a
French section of the International in London, to get the decision of the
London Conference reversed. Marx outmanoeuvred the attempt, and was
supported by Engels (making his first appearance in connection with the
International), who wrote three articles for the Commonwealth (the suc-
cessor to the Beehive as the mouthpiece of the General Council) entitled
'What have the working classes to do with Poland?' The Austro-Prussian
War also caused an outbreak of what Marx termed 'Proudhonised Stirner-
ism'^55 when Lafargue (soon to become Marx's son-in-law but then under
the influence of Proudhon) suggested that all nationalities and even
nations were 'antiquated prejudices'. In the view of the Proudhonists -
and here they were in direct opposition to Napoleon's encouragement of
national revival - all states were by nature centralised and therefore
despotic and productive of wars as well as being contrary to the small-scale
economic interests typical of Proudhon's followers. Marx had nothing but
ridicule for such views and, as he informed Engels, 'the English laughed
very much when I began my speech by saying that our friend Lafargue