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La Marseillaise

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For other uses, see La Marseillaise (disambiguation).
La Marseillaise
The Marseillais volunteers departing, sculpted on the
Arc de Triomphe
National anthem of  France
Also known asChant de Guerre pour l'Armée du Rhin
LyricsClaude Joseph Rouget de Lisle, 1792
MusicClaude Joseph Rouget de Lisle
Adopted1795
Audio sample
La Marseillaise
(Instrumental)

"La Marseillaise" (French pronunciation: [la maʁsɛjɛːz]) is the national anthem of France. The song was written in 1792 by Claude Joseph Rouget de Lisle in Strasbourg after the declaration of war by France against Austria, and was originally titled "Chant de guerre pour l'Armée du Rhin" ("War Song for the Rhine Army").

The Marseillaise was a revolutionary song, an anthem to freedom, a patriotic call to mobilize all the citizens and an exhortation to fight against tyranny and foreign invasion. The French National Convention adopted it as the Republic's anthem in 1795. It acquired its nickname after being sung in Paris by volunteers from Marseille marching on the capital. The song is the first example of the "European march" anthemic style. The anthem's evocative melody and lyrics have led to its widespread use as a song of revolution and its incorporation into many pieces of classical and popular music.

History

Belgian singer Jean Noté singing La Marseillaise in 1907.
Rouget de Lisle, composer of the Marseillaise, sings it for the first time at the home of Dietrich, Mayor of Strasbourg (Musée historique de Strasbourg, 1849 painting by Isidore Pils)

As the French Revolution continued, the monarchies of Europe became concerned that revolutionary fervor would spread to their countries. The War of the First Coalition was an effort to stop the revolution, or at least contain it to France. Initially, the French army did not distinguish itself, and Coalition armies invaded France. On 25 April 1792, baron Philippe-Frédéric de Dietrich, the mayor of Strasbourg, requested his guest Rouget de Lisle compose a song "that will rally our soldiers from all over to defend their homeland that is under threat".[1] That evening, Rouget de Lisle wrote "Chant de guerre pour l'Armée du Rhin"[2] (English: "War Song for the Army of the Rhine"), and dedicated the song to Marshal Nicolas Luckner, a Bavarian in French service from Cham.[3] A plaque on the building on Place Broglie where De Dietrich's house once stood commemorates the event.

The melody soon became the rallying call to the French Revolution and was adopted as "La Marseillaise" after the melody was first sung on the streets by volunteers (fédérés in French) from Marseille by the end of May. These fédérés were making their entrance into the city of Paris on 30 July 1792 after a young volunteer from Montpellier called François Mireur had sung it at a patriotic gathering in Marseille, and the troops adopted it as the marching song of the National Guard of Marseille.[2] A newly graduated medical doctor, Mireur later became a general under Napoléon Bonaparte and died in Egypt at age 28.[4]

The song's lyric reflects the invasion of France by foreign armies (from Prussia and Austria) that were under way when it was written. Strasbourg itself was attacked just a few days later. The invading forces were repulsed from France following their defeat in the Battle of Valmy. As the vast majority of Alsatians did not speak French, a German version ("Auf, Brüder, auf dem Tag entgegen") was published in October 1792 in Colmar.[5]

The Convention accepted it as the French national anthem in a decree passed on 14 July 1795, making it France's first anthem.[6] It later lost this status under Napoleon I, and the song was banned outright by Louis XVIII and Charles X, only being re-instated briefly after the July Revolution of 1830.[7] During Napoleon I's reign, "Veillons au Salut de l'Empire" was the unofficial anthem of the regime, and in Napoleon III's reign, it was "Partant pour la Syrie". During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, "La Marseillaise" was recognised as the anthem of the international revolutionary movement; as such, it was adopted by the Paris Commune in 1871, albeit with new lyrics under the title "La marseillaise de la Commune". Eight years later, in 1879, it was restored as France's national anthem, and has remained so ever since.[citation needed]

Musical

Several musical antecedents have been cited for the melody:

  • Mozart's Allegro maestoso of Piano Concerto No. 25[8]
  • the credo of the fourth mass of Holtzmann of Mursberg[9]
  • the Oratorio Esther by Jean Baptiste Lucien Grison[10]
  • Recent researches have pointed out that the incipit of "Tema e variazioni in Do maggiore", composed in 1781 by Piedmontese violinist and composer Giovanni Battista Viotti bears a strong resemblance to the hymn[11]

Rouget de Lisle himself never signed the Marseillaise score.

Lyrics

Only the first verse (and sometimes the fifth and sixth) and the first chorus are sung today in France. There are some slight historical variations in the lyrics of the song; the following is the version listed at the official website of the French Presidency.[12] Verses sung in the contemporary version of the anthem are in bold.

The United States Library of Congress holds the following English translation.[14]

Ye sons of France, awake to glory,
Hark, hark! what myriads bid you rise!
Your children, wives and white-haired grandsires.
Behold their tears and hear their cries! (repeat)
Shall hateful tyrants, mischiefs breeding,
With hireling hosts, a ruffian band,
Affright and desolate the land,
While peace and liberty lie bleeding?

To arms, to arms, ye brave!
The avenging sword unsheath,
March on, march on!
All hearts resolv'd
On victory or death!

Now, now, the dangerous storm is rolling
Which treacherous kings confederate raise!
The dogs of war, let loose, are howling,
And lo! our fields and cities blaze! (repeat)
alt: And lo! our homes will soon invade!
And shall we basely view the ruin
While lawless force with guilty stride
Spreads desolation far and wide
With crimes and blood his hands embruing?

To arms, to arms, ye brave!...

With luxury and pride surrounded
The vile insatiate despots dare,
Their thirst of power and gold unbounded,
To mete and vend the light and air! (repeat)
Like beasts of burden would they load us,
Like gods would bid their slaves adore,
But man is man, and who is more?
Then shall they longer lash and goad us?

To arms, to arms, ye brave!...

O Liberty, can man resign thee
Once having felt thy generous flame?
Can dungeons, bolts or bars confine thee
Or whips thy noble spirit tame? (repeat)
Too long the world has wept, bewailing
That falsehood's dagger tyrants wield,
But freedom is our sword and shield,
And all their arts are unavailing.

To arms, to arms, ye brave!...

Additional verses

These verses were omitted from the national anthem.

Notable arrangements

"La Marseillaise" was arranged for soprano, chorus and orchestra by Hector Berlioz in about 1830.[15]

Franz Liszt wrote a piano transcription of the anthem.[16]

During World War I, bandleader James Reese Europe played a jazz version of "La Marseillaise", which can be heard on Part 2 of the Ken Burns TV documentary Jazz.

Serge Gainsbourg recorded a reggae version in 1978, titled "Aux armes et cætera".[17]

Quotations in other musical works

Notable use in other media

  • Stefan Zweig narrates the creation of the anthem by Rouget De Lisle in one of the Decisive Moments in History, as does Alexandre Dumas in The Countess de Charny, claiming his account comes from Rouget de Lisle's own mouth.
  • In the 1987 NES video game Punch-Out!!, the French boxer Glass Joe uses an arrangement of La Marseillaise as his intro theme.
  • The 1938 film La Marseillaise shows the Marseille fédérés marching to Paris and singing the anthem.
  • In the RKO film Joan of Paris (1942), "La Marseillaise" is sung by a classroom full of young schoolchildren as the Gestapo hunts their teacher, a French Resistance operative.
  • "La Marseillaise" was famously used in Casablanca at the behest of Victor Laszlo (Paul Henreid) to drown out a group of German soldiers singing "Die Wacht am Rhein." It was also played during the closing card of the movie. Earlier, it appeared in Jean Renoir's La Grande Illusion in a similar defiant fashion, sung by French and British POWs.
  • The British sitcom 'Allo 'Allo! spoofed Casablanca by having the patriotic French characters start singing "La Marseillaise," only to switch to Deutschlandlied when Nazi officers enter their café.
  • Vanessa Redgrave sings "La Marsellaise" (in French) in the closing scene of Playing for Time, a 1980 CBS television film about the Auschwitz concentration camp.
  • "La Marseillaise" was used in the film Escape to Victory, also known as Victory.
  • In the biopic La Vie en Rose, chronicling the life of Edith Piaf, ten-year-old Edith is urged by her acrobat father to "do something" in the middle of a lackluster show, and she amazes the audience with an emotional rendition of "La Marseillaise."
  • The carillon of the town hall in the Bavarian town of Cham plays "La Marseillaise" every day at 12.05 pm to commemorate the French Marshal Nicolas Luckner, who was born there.[21]
  • The first part of the "La Marseillaise" was used in the film's opening scene in the 2007 Disney's Pixar film, Ratatouille.

Historical use in Russia

La Marseillaise
La Marseillaise performed on a synthesizer.
Problems playing this file? See media help.

In Russia, La Marseillaise was used as a republican revolutionary anthem by those who knew French starting in the 18th century, almost simultaneously with its adoption in France. In 1875 Peter Lavrov, a narodist revolutionary and theorist, wrote a Russian-language text (not a translation of the French one) to the same melody. This "Worker's Marseillaise" became one of the most popular revolutionary songs in Russia and was used in the Revolution of 1905. After the February Revolution of 1917, it was used as the semi-official national anthem of the new Russian republic. Even after the October Revolution, it remained in use for a while alongside The Internationale.[22]

Criticism and controversy

The English philosopher and reformer Jeremy Bentham, who was declared an honorary citizen of France in 1791 in acknowledgement of his sympathies for the ideals of the French Revolution, was not enamoured of La Marseillaise. Contrasting its qualities with the "beauty" and "simplicity" of "God Save the King", he wrote in 1796:

The War whoop of anarchy, the Marseillais Hymn, is to my ear, I must confess, independently of all moral association, a most dismal, flat, and unpleasing ditty: and to any ear it is at any rate a long winded and complicated one. In the instance of a melody so mischievous in its application, it is a fortunate incident, if, in itself, it should be doomed neither in point of universality, nor permanence, to gain equal hold on the affections of the people.[23]

Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, a former President of France, has said that it is ridiculous to sing about drenching French fields with impure Prussian blood as a German Chancellor takes the salute in Paris.[24] A 1992 campaign to change the words of the song involving more than 100 prominent French citizens, including Danielle Mitterrand, wife of then-President François Mitterrand, was unsuccessful.[25]

The historian Simon Schama discussed La Marseillaise on BBC Radio 4's Today programme on 17 November 2015 (in the immediate aftermath of the Paris attacks), saying it was "... the great example of courage and solidarity when facing danger; that's why it is so invigorating, that's why it really is the greatest national anthem in the world, ever. Most national anthems are pompous, brassy, ceremonious, but this is genuinely thrilling. Very important in the song ... is the line before us is tyranny, the bloody standard of tyranny has risen. There is no more ferocious tyranny right now than ISIS, so it's extremely easy for the tragically and desperately grieving French to identify with that".[26]

See also

Footnotes

  1. ^ "La Marseillaise". National Assembly of France. Retrieved 24 April 2012.
  2. ^ a b Weber, Eugen (1 June 1976). Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France, 1870–1914. Stanford University Press. p. 439. ISBN 978-0-8047-1013-8. Retrieved 24 April 2012.
  3. ^ Stevens, Benjamin F. (January 1896). "Story of La Marseillaise". The Musical Record (408). Boston, Massachusetts: Oliver Ditson Company: 2. Retrieved 24 April 2012.
  4. ^ "General François Mireur". Retrieved 26 January 2015.
  5. ^ Wochenblatt, dem Unterricht des Landvolks gewidmet, Colmar 1792 [1].
  6. ^ Mould, Michael (2011). The Routledge Dictionary of Cultural References in Modern French. New York: Taylor & Francis. p. 147. ISBN 978-1-136-82573-6. Retrieved 23 November 2011.
  7. ^ Modern History Sourcebook: La Marseillaise, 1792.
  8. ^ http://kennedycenter.com/calendar/index.cfm?fuseaction=composition&composition_id=2373
  9. ^ Ripley, George; Dana, Charles A., eds. (1879). "Marseillaise" . The American Cyclopædia. See also Geschichte eines deutschen Liedes at German Wikisource.
  10. ^ Gilman, D. C.; Peck, H. T.; Colby, F. M., eds. (1905). "Marseillaise" . New International Encyclopedia (1st ed.). New York: Dodd, Mead.
  11. ^ "La Marseillaise, un hymne à l'histoire tourmentée" (in French). Retrieved 20 November 2015.
  12. ^ La Marseillaise, l'Elysée.
  13. ^ The seventh verse was not part of the original text; it was added in 1792 by an unknown author.
  14. ^ Library of Congress
  15. ^ William Apthorp (1879) Hector Berlioz; Selections from His Letters, and Aesthetic, Humorous, and Satirical Writings, Henry Holt, New York
  16. ^ L.J. de Bekker (1909) Stokes' Encyclopedia of Music and Musicians, Frederick Stokes, New York
  17. ^ "SCANDALES DU XXe SIÈCLE – Gainsbourg métisse 'La Marseillaise' " (1 September 2006) Le Monde, Paris Template:Fr icon
  18. ^ Described and played on BBC Radio 3's CD Review program (14 January 2012)
  19. ^ "La Marsellesa Aprista", Partido Aprista Peruano, Official Website
  20. ^ Boletín del Comité Central del PSCH N°34–35, April–May 1973.
  21. ^ Cham.de
  22. ^ Соболева, Н.А. 2005. Из истории отечественных государственных гимнов. Журнал "Отечественная история", 1. P.10-12
  23. ^ Bentham, Jeremy (2001). Quinn, Michael (ed.). Writings on the Poor Laws, Vol. I. Oxford: Clarendon Press. p. 136. ISBN 0199242321.
  24. ^ Bremner, Charles (14 May 2014). "Cannes star denounces 'racist' Marseillaise at festival opening". The Times. Retrieved 14 May 2014.
  25. ^ Riding, Alan (5 March 1992). "Aux Barricades! 'La Marseillaise' Is Besieged". The New York Times. Retrieved 14 May 2014.
  26. ^ "Simon Schama explains La Marseillaise". BBC News. 17 November 2015. Retrieved 23 November 2015.

Further reading

  • Charles Hughes, "Music of the French Revolution," Science and Society, vol. 4, No. 2 (Spring 1940), pp. 193–210. In JSTOR.
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