In December 1871 Paul Lafargue and his wife Laura Marx - along with their young son who would die the following year - settled in Madrid, after having entered Spain in August fleeing the repression of the Paris Commune.

[2] One of the Congress secretaries, before those gathered by order of the civil governor left the premises, read a protest note signed by all the delegates "on behalf of all the associated workers from Spain, and on the face of the world" for the "brutal and scandalous outrage of which they have been victims".

Until now they have limited themselves to insulting and threatening us in their speeches and in their circulars; today they loudly proclaim, with an illegal and violent act, that the children of work cannot be reunited peacefully.

In effect, the Congress met on the 4th at the premises of the Zaragoza Federation and it was agreed to hold public sessions from the 7th, but not having been able to find a place, it was left for the 8th in the Novedades room.

The governor sent an official letter declaring that the public session could not be held, on the grounds that the International is an "association contrary to the laws because it goes against social foundations: the State, religion, property and the family."

Congress agreed to reject the governor's refusal and to meet publicly in the designated place, and in the case of dissolution by that authority, to launch an energetic protest.

The proposal, postponed at the 1870 Barcelona Workers' Congress, to carry out a union action to achieve a reduction in working hours was also discussed, but it was rejected on the grounds:[13] that the ideal of reducing from eight to ten hours the maximum of the daily work of all arts and crafts and trying to find the best possible means of establishing equality in wages, are restricted ideals before the great object that our Association proposes itself, that is, abolition of wage labor and classes and establishing economic equality between the individuals of both sexes.There was a "recognition of the defenders of the Paris Commune, who suffer on the pontoons and in exile the consequences of their love for the cause of the emancipation of the proletariat, their own time that a fond memory to the victims caused by the barbarians of Versailles".

The opposite is to subject it to the narrowness of the domestic home and the tyranny of man, Therefore: The tendency of the internationals should be to make it enter the labor movement, so that it contributes to the common work, the emancipation of the proletariat; because just as in the present social organization there is no sex difference in the face of exploitation, neither should there be any in justice.A new Council was elected whose members were all members of Mikhail Bakunin's International Alliance of Socialist Democracy: Francisco Tomás (bricklayer), Anselmo Lorenzo (printer), Peregrín Montoro (silk weaver), Francisco Martínez (dyer) and Francisco Mora Méndez, who were joined by the Valencians Vicente Rosell (silk weaver), Vicente Torres (bookseller), Vicente Asesni (cabinetmaker) and Cayetano Martí (stonemason), since they decided to move the headquarters of the Council from Madrid to Valencia.