The intriguingly murky history behind the French national anthem
Anyone who’s been following the Paris Olympics will surely be familiar with La Marseillaise by now, but the story behind France’s national anthem is both considerably more obscure and interesting than even the most flagrantly francophilic of us might appreciate.
In a desperate effort to motivate France’s underperforming forces during the 1792 Revolutionary War of the First Coalition, Baron Philippe-Frédéric Dietrich, the Mayor of Strasbourg, a town directly threatened by the combined Prussian and Austrian forces, asked army engineer and fellow Freemason Claude Joseph Rouget de Lisle to compose an inspirational song to rally the bedraggled republican troops.
De Lisle promptly responded with his “War Song for the Army of the Rhine” (Chant de guerre pour l’Armée du Rhin)— which, a month or so later, caught the attention of François Mireur, a recent graduate from the Montpellier medical school who’d just enlisted in the new army. He incorporated the song in his efforts to organize volunteers in nearby Marseille—so much so that when his new recruits made their entrance into Paris a few months later, belting it out as they marched, it became inextricably linked with their Mediterranean city, thereby becoming simply “La Marseillaise”.
A few years later, in 1795, when the republican army had achieved considerable military success, it was officially adopted as the French national anthem.
But our story hardly ends there, as one might expect from a place whose much-ballyhooed Revolution gave rise to a 21-year period of anarchical factionalism, summary executions and a bloody expansionist tyranny, before culminating in the restoration of the very monarchy that triggered the whole business to start with.
For the better part of a century, La Marseillaise was either ignored (during the reigns of Napoleon I and Napoleon III) or banned outright (under Louis XVIII and Charles X), until eventually repopularized during the 1871 Paris Commune, hard on the heels of another unsuccessful military effort against the Prussians. Eight years after that, in 1878, it was finally re-established as France’s official national anthem.
By then, Baron Dietrich, the Strasbourg Mayor whose patriotic determination had led to its creation, was long dead, yet another random victim of The Terror. A few years later, the music-loving Dr Mireur, now a general, died on the battlefield at the age of 28 during Napoleon’s Egyptian Campaign.
And Rouget de Lisle, the song’s composer? After being imprisoned during the Terror for his royalist sympathies and nearly executed, he once more found himself in prison in the 1820s, this time for debt, before finally receiving some much-needed public recognition and an even more-needed pension from Louis Philippe I, “the Citizen King”, shortly before his death in 1836.
But all of this is naturally swept under the historical rug when we watch France’s newly-crowned Olympic athletes stand on the podium and proudly intone how the republic’s ferocious soldiers will slit the enemy’s throats so that their blood will fill the nation’s furrows.
So much, so expected—if, admittedly, particularly gory, even by the unpalatably jingoistic and retrograde standards of national anthems (gloating Americans, meanwhile, might want to consult the third verse of theirs that triumphantly denounces those unpatriotic slaves who had the temerity to fight against their oppressors).
But what is most surprising, and carries with it a delightfully ironic sting, is the possibility that the music of La Marseillaise wasn’t actually written by a Frenchman after all. In 2013, the Italian violinist and conductor Guido Rimonda declared that Rouget de Lisle stole it from Giovanni Battista Viotti’s “Tema e variazioni in do maggiore”, published eleven years earlier in 1781:
So far as I can tell, the musicological jury seems to be out on that one (the melody is clearly the same, but the question of chronological primacy remains opaque), but personally I’m hoping that it’s true, because it vividly highlights our present incongruity of being deluged with hyper-partisan screaming on all sides while watching international athletes compete on a stage that consistently claims to represent the ideals of global peace and harmony.
It would be nice to think that, somehow, that might change: that individual athletic accomplishment might one day be universally appreciated in its own right without any accompanying nationalistic triumphalism and frantically-updated “medal leaderboards” being continually shoved down our throats.
Unlikely? Certainly. But every now and then there are glimmers of hope, like when Léon Marchand’s recent superhuman aquatic display left everyone on the planet in a state of head-shaking admiration.
Imagine if that sort of thing happened more often.
As Edith Piaf so eloquently expressed it:
You may say I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one; I hope someday you’ll join us, and the world will be as one.”
Howard Burton, August 5, 2024
Howard is a filmmaker and author of 6 books on a wide range of topics. He is the Director of Pandemic Perspectives (2022), Through the Mirror of Chess: A Cultural Exploration (2023), Raphael: A Portrait (2024) and Botticelli’s Primavera (2025) which is the first film in our Renaissance Masterpieces Series.
