1760–1836 · France · Romantic
Claude Joseph Rouget de Lisle (1760–1836) was a French military engineer, poet and composer. In April 1792 in Strasbourg he became the author of a war song for the Rhine army, later called the Marseillaise, which became the anthem of France. The catalogue includes this song for voice and piano.
Claude Joseph Rouget was born on 10 May 1760 in Lons-le-Saunier, in the Franche-Comté region. He was the eldest of the eight children of Claude Ignace Rouget and Jeanne Madeleine Gaillande. His father worked as a lawyer, and the family belonged to the well-off townspeople.
The boy showed a pull towards music from early childhood. His father was preparing him for entry to a military school and sent him to the local college. He was allowed to study music only as far as an amateur needs for playing the violin, which fashion of the day expected of young men from "good families".
In 1776 Rouget entered the Royal Engineering School at Mézières. The way in was open to commoners, because the nobility did not value this specialty highly. To be admitted he had to add the noble particle "de" to his surname, and "de Lisle" was the name of his grandfather.
He finished the school in 1782, became a military engineer and rose to the rank of captain. He served in several garrisons, among them Mont-Dauphin in the Alps.
On 1 May 1791 Rouget de Lisle was posted to Strasbourg. There, in a masonic lodge, he met the mayor of the city, Philippe-Frédéric de Dietrich. Strasbourg was the seat of the headquarters of the Army of the Rhine, formed in 1791 under Marshal Luckner.
He had already been writing for the stage: on 21 February 1791 a comedy in four acts, Bayard dans Bresse, was staged at the Théâtre Italien. Rouget de Lisle wrote the libretto and Stanislas Champein the music. In Strasbourg, at the mayor's request, he composed a Hymn to Liberty for the festival of the constitution planned for 25 September 1791. The crowd sang it in the Place d'Armes.
In April 1792 France declared war on Austria, and Rouget de Lisle's unit was stationed in Strasbourg. At a reception for the officers of the garrison, Marshal Luckner among them, Mayor Dietrich asked Captain Rouget de Lisle to compose a war song.
The song was written by Rouget de Lisle. Titled Chant de guerre pour l'armée du Rhin, it carried a dedication to Marshal Luckner. It was the mayor himself who first sang it, for his guests at home. His wife Louise de Dietrich arranged the score for harpsichord and other instruments.
The song was taken up by volunteers: they brought it to Paris at the end of July 1792, the volunteers from the department of Bouches-du-Rhône. It became the "Marche des Marseillais" and then the Marseillaise. In December 1792, when the Austrians lost the citadel of Namur, where Rouget de Lisle distinguished himself as an engineer, he added two verses "to the Belgians" to the song, printed in Namur.
In 1879 the Marseillaise became the national anthem of France. Before that it had briefly held this status, from 1795 to 1804.
In June 1792 Rouget de Lisle left Strasbourg to take charge of the fortress of Huningue. He remained a constitutional monarchist and accepted neither the proclamation of the republic by the Convention on 21 September 1792 nor the trial of Louis XVI, which ended with the king's execution on 21 January 1793.
When the Montagnards came to power on 2 June 1793, Rouget de Lisle was counted a "suspect" and ended up behind bars in the years of the Terror, yet he never went to the guillotine. Dietrich, the mayor of Strasbourg, paid with his life.
In 1795, after the fall of Robespierre, General Hoche sent him to the Army of the Coasts of Brest. There he fought the Chouans and the émigrés in the Quiberon expedition in June and July. In 1796 Rouget de Lisle retired.
He did not manage to win a literary reputation, and Rouget de Lisle had to be content with hack work: he wrote prefaces, translated English works and prepared memoirs. In the Napoleonic period he ran a company that supplied food to the armies. He met the creation of the empire in 1804 with hostility and even dared to write to Napoleon that he was ruining both himself and France.
His 1797 collection Essais en vers et en prose comes from this period. The Marseillaise is printed in it together with a prose story, Adelaide et Monville, and a few poems written for particular occasions. Rouget translated the fables of Krylov into French, among them "The Geese", and wrote the "Hymn of the Industrials" for the Saint-Simonians, whose movement he joined.
In 1814, during the first Restoration of the Bourbons, he wrote the song Vive le Roi! in praise of the French monarchy; it did not please Louis XVIII. In 1825 he published the collection Chants français ("French Songs"), with about fifty songs by various authors, for which he wrote the music himself. In 1830 Hector Berlioz made a new orchestration of the Marseillaise.
Rouget de Lisle's situation became precarious: he had to sell his father's inheritance. A letter to him from the poet Pierre-Jean de Béranger is known, sent on 21 June 1826 to the Sainte-Pélagie prison, where he was held for debts. After the revolution of 1830 he was awarded the Legion of Honour. King Louis-Philippe I granted him in 1830 a life pension of 1500 francs and added two thousand more in 1832.
Rouget de Lisle died in June 1836 at Choisy-le-Roi, in the home of Élise Voïart, who took him in and cared for him devotedly. At the end of his life he lived in extreme poverty. He was first buried at Thiais, on the property of his friend Ange François Blein.
His remains were moved to the Invalides in Paris on 14 July 1915, during the First World War, and buried beside Napoleon. His grave in the cemetery at Choisy-le-Roi has been kept. In 1882 a monument by the sculptor Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi was unveiled in Lons-le-Saunier, and the same year a monument by Léopold Steiner was set up in Choisy-le-Roi.
Rouget de Lisle is known above all as the author of the Chant de guerre pour l'armée du Rhin, a war song of the Rhine army later called the Marseillaise. It is his main work, and it is the one that made his name known. He added two verses "to the Belgians" to the Marseillaise, and in 1830 Hector Berlioz made a new orchestration of it.
He wrote military and revolutionary songs, romances and opera libretti. In 1791 he composed a Hymn to Liberty for the festival of the constitution, and for the comedy Bayard dans Bresse he wrote the libretto; Stanislas Champein composed its music. The song Vive le Roi! appeared in 1814, and in 1825 the collection Chants français ("French Songs"), in which about fifty songs by various authors are set to his music. For the Saint-Simonians he wrote the "Hymn of the Industrials".
He wrote prose as well: the 1797 collection Essays in Verse and Prose held the Marseillaise, a prose story Adelaide et Monville and a few poems written for particular occasions. He translated the fables of Krylov into French.
His other works remained little known. They include a hymn on the conspiracy of Robespierre and the revolution of 9 Thermidor (Hymne dithyrambique sur la conjuration de Robespierre et la Révolution du 9 Thermidor, 1794) and the song Vive le Roi! of 1814. His songs are tied to the events of the age: the festival of the constitution in 1791, the war of 1792, the return of the Bourbons in 1814.
For a player, the Chant de guerre pour l'armée du Rhin is a chance to learn the history of this song. It is a song with words, so the catalogue offers it for voice with piano. A pianist will gain from knowing how it came about: in Strasbourg in April 1792, at the start of the war, at the request of the mayor, who sang it first at home, while his wife arranged the score for harpsichord.
The catalogue offers the Chant de guerre pour l'Armée du Rhin for voice and piano, at the intermediate-plus level. This is the piece to start with when getting to know the composer.