During the great English revolution of 1688, Lord Wharton, as Macaulay
says, wrote "a satirical ballad on the administration of Tyrconnel. In
this little poem an Irishman congratulates a brother Irishman, in a
barbarous jargon, on the approaching triumph of popery, and of the
Milesian race. The Protestant heir will be excluded. The Protestant
officers will be broken. The Great Charter, and the praters who appeal
to it, will be hanged in one rope. The good Talbot will shower
commissions on his countrymen, and will cut the throats of the English.
These verses, which were in no respect above the ordinary standard of
street poetry, had for burden some gibberish which was said to have
been used as a watchword by the insurgents of Ulster in 1641. The
verses and the tune caught the fancy of the nation. From one end of
England to the other, all classes were constantly singing this idle
rhyme. It was especially the delight of the English army. More than
seventy years after the revolution, a great writer delineated, with
exquisite skill, a veteran who had fought at the Boyne and at Namur.
One of the characteristics of the good old soldier is his trick of
whistling 'Lillibullero.'
"Wharton afterward boasted that he had sung a king out of three
kingdoms. But in truth the success of 'Lillibullero' was the effect,
and not the cause, of that excited state of public feeling which
produced the revolution."
The English revolution had its "Lillibullero," the French Revolution
its "Marseillaise." The former is never heard now; the latter, in
which spirited words are wedded to inspiring music, is undying.
Lamartine said, "Glory and crime, victory and death, are mingled in its
strains." Sir Walter Scott called it "the finest hymn to which Liberty
has ever given birth." Heine exclaimed, "What a song! It thrills me
with fiery delight, it kindles within me the glowing star of
enthusiasm;" and Carlyle pronounced it "the luckiest musical
composition ever promulgated."
In the spring of 1792, a young officer of artillery was in garrison at
Strasburg. His name was Rouget de Lisle, and his talents as poet,
singer, and musician had rendered him a welcome guest at the house of
Dietrich, the mayor of the city. Famine reigned in Strasburg, and one
day, when the Dietrich family could offer but a scanty repast to the
youthful soldier, Dietrich produced a bottle of wine, and said, "Let us
drink to Liberty and to our country. There will soon be a patriotic
celebration at Strasburg; may these last drops inspire De Lisle with
one of those hymns which convey to the soul of the people the
intoxication from whence they proceed." The wine was drunk and the
friends separated for the night. De Lisle went to his room and sought
inspiration, "now in his patriotic soul, now in his harpsichord;
sometimes composing the air before the words, sometimes the words
before the air, and so combining them in his thoughts that he himself
did not know whether the notes or the verses came first, and it was
impossible to separate the poetry from the music, or the sentiment from
the expression. He sang all and set down nothing."
In the morning De Lisle wrote down the words and music and went with
them to Dietrich's house. The old patriot invited some friends, who
were as fond of music as himself, to listen, and his eldest daughter
played the accompaniment, while Rouget sang. "At the first stanza all
faces turned pale; at the second tears ran down every cheek, and at the
last all the madness of enthusiasm broke forth. The hymn of the
country, destined also to be the hymn of terror, was found. A few
months afterward the unfortunate Dietrich went to the scaffold to the
sound of the very notes which had their origin on his own hearth, in
the heart of his friend, and in the voices of his children."
[Illustration: Rouget de l'Isle Singing the Marseillaise. From
painting by I. A. A. Pils.]
It was on April 25th that De Lisle's hymn was sung at Dietrich's house.
The next day it was copied and arranged for a military band, and on
April 29th it was performed by the band of the Garde Nationale at a
review. On June 25th, a singer named Mireur sang it with so much
effect at a civic banquet at Marseilles that it was at once printed and
distributed to the volunteers of the battalion just starting for Paris,
which they entered by the Faubourg St. Antoine on July 30th, singing
their new hymn. It was heard again on August 10th, when the mob
stormed the palace of the Tuileries. From that time the "_chant de
guerre pour l'armée du Rhin_," as it had been christened, was known as
the "Chanson" or "Chant de Marseillais," and finally as "La
Marseillaise." The original edition contained only six couplets; the
seventh was added by the journalist Dubois.
Rouget de Lisle's authorship of the music has been often contested, but
it is proven by the conclusive evidence contained in the pamphlet on
the subject, by his nephew, published in Paris, in 1865. Schumann has
used the "Marseillaise" in the overture to "Hermann and Dorothea," and
also in his song of the "Two Grenadiers."
Its author, Claude Joseph Rouget de Lisle, was born at Montaigu,
Lous-le-Saulnier, in 1760. Entering the school of Royal Engineers at
Mezières in 1782, in 1789 he was a second lieutenant and quartered at
Besançon. Here, a few days after the fall of the Bastille, on July
14th, he wrote his first patriotic song to the tune of a favourite air.
The next year found him at Strasburg, where his "Hymn to Liberty," set
to music by Pleyel, was sung at the fête of September 25, 1791. One of
his pieces, "Bayard en Bresse," produced at Paris in 1791, was not
successful. Being the son of royalist parents and one of the
constitutional party, Rouget de Lisle refused to take the oath to the
constitution abolishing the crown, and was therefore cashiered,
denounced, and imprisoned, not escaping until after the fall of
Robespierre. It is told that as he fled through a pass of the Alps he
heard his own song. "'What is the name of that hymn?' he asked his
guide. 'The Marseillaise,' was the peasant's reply. It was then that
he learned the name of his own work. He was pursued by the enthusiasm
which he had scattered behind him, and escaped death with difficulty.
The weapon recoiled against the hand which had forged it; the
Revolution in its madness no longer recognised its own voice."
De Lisle afterward reëntered the army, made the campaign of La Vendée
under Hoche, was wounded, and at length, under the consulate, returned
to private life at Montaigu. Poor and alone, he remained there until
the second Restoration, when, his brother having sold the little family
property, he came to Paris. Here he was unfortunate and would have
starved but for a small pension granted by Louis XVIII., and continued
by Louis Philippe, and for the care of his friends, the poet Béranger
and the sculptor David d'Angers, and especially M. and Madame Voiart.
At the house of the Voiarts in Choisy-le-Roi, Rouget de Lisle died in
1836.
His other works include a volume of "Essais en vers et en prose,"
issued in 1797, "Cinquante Chants Français" (1825), and "Macbeth," a
lyrical tragedy (1827). He also wrote a song called "Roland at
Roncesvalles," and a "Hymn to the Setting Sun."
Two statues, if no more, have been erected to him in France,--one at
Lous-le-Saulnier, from the hand of Bartholdi, and another at
Choisy-le-Roi.
Pils, to whom we owe the picture of Rouget de Lisle singing his
immortal chant, was a French artist, who died in 1875, at the age of
sixty-two, having gained many medals and a professorship of painting at
the Paris School of Fine Arts. His fame was mostly won by pictures of
the war in the Crimea, notably by his "Battle of the Alma," now in the
gallery at Versailles. The "Rouget de Lisle," painted in 1849, belongs
to the French nation. Pils decorated the ceiling over the grand
staircase in the Paris Opera House.