Anniversaries
The “Marseillaise” inspires the revolutionary nation to fight another day
In the late spring of 1792, revolutionary France had declared war on Austria. A coalition of enemies would soon be at the country’s frontiers, and thousands of men were marching to battle.
In Strasbourg, two men were having dinner at the local Masonic lodge, a magnet for reformers and free thinkers. One was the city’s mayor, Baron de Dietrich. The other was an officer in the local corps of military engineers, one Claude-Joseph Rouget de Lisle. Their talk turned to the best way to inspire the troops in France’s hour of need, and the mayor had an idea. “Mr de Lisle, write us a song that will rally our soldiers to defend their homeland,” he said, “and you will have won the nation.”
That night, Rouget de Lisle set to work. The result was the “War Song for the Army of the Rhine”, better known today as the “Marseillaise”. And given the circumstances, the words are understandably pretty bloodthirsty: “Arise, children of the Fatherland, / The day of glory has arrived /… Let’s march, let’s march! / Let an impure blood / Water our furrows…”
It was, of course, a triumph. As the writer Stefan Zweig later put it: “For one night, it was granted to… Rouget de Lisle to be a brother of the immortals. Out of the opening of the song, taken from the street and the newspapers, creative words form at his command and rise into a verse that, in its poetic expression, is as abiding as the melody is immortal.”