La Marseillaise

The story

The monarchies of Europe feared that the French Revolution would spread, and in the War of the First Coalition they tried to stop it. The Kingdom of the French declared war on Austria, the French army fared badly at first, and Coalition armies invaded France. On 25 April 1792 Baron Philippe Friedrich Dietrich, mayor of Strasbourg, asked his guest Claude Joseph Rouget de Lisle to write a song to rally soldiers to defend the threatened country. That evening Rouget de Lisle wrote "Chant de guerre pour l'Armée du Rhin" ("War Song for the Army of the Rhine") and dedicated it to Marshal Nicolas Luckner. A plaque on Place Broglie marks the site of Dietrich's house. Dietrich himself was executed the next year, during the Reign of Terror.

The song took its lasting name from volunteers (fédérés) from Marseille. A young volunteer from Montpellier, François Mireur, sang it at a patriotic gathering in Marseille, the city's National Guard adopted it as its marching song, and the fédérés sang it in the streets as they marched to Paris, which they entered on 30 July 1792. It spread quickly as a song of the Revolution. Because most Alsatians did not speak French, a German version was published in Colmar in October 1792. The invading armies were driven back after the Battle of Valmy.

The National Convention made it France's first national anthem by a decree of 14 July 1795. It lost that status under Napoleon I, was banned outright by Louis XVIII and Charles X, and returned only briefly after the July Revolution of 1830. Napoleon III's government brought it back to rally the country in the Franco-Prussian War, and the Paris Commune of 1871 sang it with new words. In 1879 it was restored as the national anthem and has remained so since.

Through the 19th and early 20th centuries it was the anthem of revolutionary movements well beyond France. In Russia, Peter Lavrov wrote new Russian words to the melody in 1875; this "Worker's Marseillaise" was sung in the Revolution of 1905 and served as the semi-official anthem of the Russian republic after the February Revolution of 1917. In Korea it was used as a protest song in the March First Movement against Japanese rule in 1919. In Austria, when Robert Schumann quoted it in 1839, singing it was forbidden as a piece that might cause public disorder.

Its words have long drawn criticism. Jeremy Bentham called it "the war whoop of anarchy" in 1796. In the 1970s President Valéry Giscard d'Estaing objected to singing its violent lines against Prussian enemies while a German chancellor stood beside him in Paris, and a 1992 campaign by more than 100 prominent French citizens, among them Danielle Mitterrand, failed to change them. Serge Gainsbourg's reggae version of 1979 was attacked in Le Figaro. Usually only the first verse is sung today.

What it says

A call to arms: citizens are summoned to take up weapons and march against invading armies and the tyranny they bring, to protect their homes and families. The mood is urgent and fierce, with vivid images of bloodshed, and it ends in a refrain that commands the people to form their battalions.

The words