Can you listen to the French national anthem without wanting to jump out of your seat? When you hear its pulsing rhythms, you can picture the men and women at the barricades ala Les Miserables? How about Victor Lazlo singing La Marseillaise at Rick's Saloon incurring the wrath of the Germans? This song causes you to react, which was the point. Below is the history of the anthem taken in its entirety from Wikipedia. (I didn't even bother to paraphrase.)
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| de Lisle singing his composition for Mayor of Strousbourg |
On 25 April 1792,
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.” That evening, de Lisle wrote Chant de
guerre pour l’Armée du Rhin and dedicated the song to Marshal Nicolas Luckner,
a Bavarian in
French service from Cham. 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)
from Marseille.
These fédérés were making their entryway into the city of Paris on 30
July 1792 after a young volunteer from
Montpelier named Francois 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. A newly graduated medical doctor, Mireur later became a general
under Napoleon a nd died in Egypt at age 28.
