Claude Joseph Rouget de Lisle
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Rouget de Lisle, composer of the Marseillaise, sings it for the first time. |
Claude Joseph Rouget de Lisle (born
May 10,
1760 in
Lons-le-Saunier,
Jura; died
June 26,
1836 in
Choisy-le-Roi,
Seine-et-Oise) was a
French composer who in 1792 wrote
La Marseillaise, the French
national anthem.
Rouget de Lisle entered the army as an
engineer and attained the rank of
captain. The
song that has immortalised him, the
Marseillaise, was composed at
Strasbourg, where Rouget de Lisle was quartered in April 1792. He wrote both words and music in a fit of patriotic excitement after a public dinner. The piece was at first called
Chant de guerre de l'armée du Rhin ("Battle Hymn of the
Rhine Army") and only received its name of
Marseillaise from its adoption by the
Provençal volunteers whom
Barbaroux introduced into
Paris and who were prominent in the storming of the
Tuileries Palace on the
10th of August. Rouget de Lisle was a moderate
republican and was cashiered and thrown into prison, but was freed during the counter-revolution.
Rouget de Lisle wrote a few other songs of the same kind as the
Marseillaise and in 1825 he published
Chants français (
French Songs) in which he set to music fifty songs by various authors. His
Essais en vers et en prose (
Attempts in Verse and Prose, 1797) contains the
Marseillaise; a
prose tale
Adelaide et Monville of the sentimental kind; and some occasional
poems.
His ashes were transferred from Choisy-le-Roi cemetery to the
Invalides on 14 July 1915, during
World War I.
