Chant des Partisans

The story

The "Chant des Partisans", also called the "Chant de la Libération", was the best-known song of the Free French and the French Resistance during the German occupation of France. Its music is by Anna Marly, a Russian émigrée who had left France for London in 1940 and served there as a volunteer canteen worker with the Free French Forces. In 1941 she composed a song in Russian, her mother tongue, which she called the "Marche des partisans" or "Guerilla Song", inspired by the resistance of Soviet soldiers at Smolensk; another account has the Russian song "Through Valleys and Over Hills" give her the idea.

In May 1943 the Resistance broadcast Honneur et Patrie, prepared in London by André Gillois and Emmanuel d'Astier de La Vigerie, needed a signature tune. Marly played them six of her melodies on the guitar, and from 17 May 1943 the tune of the partisans' song, whistled, opened the programme, broadcast twice a day on the BBC. It was whistled so as to sound like fighters walking the roads, and because a whistle stayed audible through German jamming; in the maquis it became a sign of recognition. D'Astier, hearing Marly sing her Russian song at the London home of Lioubov Krassine, asked for French words. Joseph Kessel and his nephew Maurice Druon, who had just joined the Free French, wrote them on 30 May 1943 at the Ashdown Park Hotel in Surrey; they are original words, not a translation of the Russian. Germaine Sablon, Kessel's companion, sang them the next day for Alberto Cavalcanti's propaganda film Three Songs about Resistance, recorded at Ealing.

The manuscript was flown into occupied France on 25 July 1943 by d'Astier and Jean-Pierre Lévy, in a Lockheed Hudson piloted by Hugh Verity that landed near Ambérieu-en-Bugey, and the words were printed in September 1943 in the first number of the clandestine review Les Cahiers de Libération. According to the poet Pierre Seghers, the words themselves were hardly sung during the war, and the song was known in France mainly through its broadcast tune, heard until 2 May 1944.

After the Liberation the song was so popular that it was proposed as a new national anthem, and for a short time it served as an unofficial one beside "La Marseillaise". André Malraux revived it on 19 December 1964, when the ashes of Jean Moulin were taken to the Panthéon, calling on the young of France to hear it. In 2006 Druon gave the handwritten original to the museum of the Legion of Honour, and it was classified a historic monument on 8 December 2006. Marly's other song of the Resistance, "La Complainte du partisan", with words by d'Astier, is sometimes confused with it.

What it says

A call to the people of occupied France to rise and fight for their country's liberation, presented as a struggle of life or death; grave, stark and resolute.

The words

The words of this song are still in copyright, so the Institute does not print them itself: Genius shows them below, under its own licence.