Republic or Death! (4 page)

That said, living in them at night must be awful. You'd be able to hear sounds from miles away. Every time you watched a detective show, you'd start wondering if the murderer was coming for you that night. As I cycled past these homes, all I could think about was how terrifying it must have been for anyone in them when the Marseillais marched past. It might have been 2 or 3 a.m. when they were woken by the first sound. They'd have ignored it, at first. Fifteen minutes later, they wouldn't have been able to. It would be louder, and they'd be able to tell it was a group of people singing. ‘It's probably just some drunks, love. Go back to sleep.' A few minutes after that, the sound louder still, no such explanation would have been plausible. They wouldn't know what the men were singing, because they'd only speak Provençal, but they'd know it sounded aggressive, violent, proud. They would have got up and peered out of the window. And what they'd have seen would have caused them to jump back, and run downstairs to check that the door was firmly bolted: 517 men, flaming torches in hand, dragging two cannons behind them.

No one knows how many times the men sang ‘La Marseillaise' each night. It could have been seventy, by my reckoning. That's all seven verses, one after the other, sung for eight hours straight. But then it might have been just a few, only rolled out when the soldiers reached a town, to let everyone know they'd been through. However many it was, it wasn't forgotten.

*

I leave Avignon after having a look at the Papal Palace (now a vast, empty sandstone fortress) and the Pont Saint-Bénezet, a medieval bridge that once gracefully stretched 900 metres across the river Rhône. Today, having collapsed due to flood damage, it stops surreally 100 metres out, almost inviting you to run along it and jump off.

I'm feeling confident. I've managed two whole days cycling, covering about 80 miles. The temperature's finally dropped. And I've met some interesting people; last night I sat at a bar by a waterwheel inside the city's walls, drinking with a young teacher named Olivier Duveau who told me he hated the violence in ‘La Marseillaise'. ‘France doesn't need a war song any more,' he said. ‘It should have a love song, like, er, Edith Piaf's “La Vie en Rose”' (sample line: ‘Nights of love no longer finish'). But then he sang ‘La Marseillaise' with the biggest grin on his face. He'd just come back from years working in Canada, and singing it was the first time he actually felt French again, he said. So, yes, I leave Avignon feeling optimistic.

That is a mistake.

I'm heading for Châteauneuf-du-Pape, the home of some of France's most famous vineyards. It's only 10 miles away but a few minutes in, as I'm speeding along a main road, a wind starts up. God knows where it comes from. I turn a corner, and there it is, a wall that almost bounces me right into the side of a truck. I've got two panniers on my bike filled with recording equipment, maps, clothes and a range of bike tools I'm clearly never going to use, but it was like none of that weight mattered – the wind simply flung me aside. I start up once more, but just cycle into another wall of air, barely avoiding another truck – and this one had been giving me about three metres' space, having seen the first incident. I get round the next corner, which seems to offer some protection, and am about to breathe out in relief when it starts to rain. It's like the weather itself is trying to tell me this trip's a bad idea. I eventually make it off the main road, and follow some winding lanes to take refuge in a village cafe. The sun decides to come out as soon as I close the door.

It's only 10.30 a.m., but there's already a couple inside having some wine. The man has a big grey moustache and large, flabby cheeks. He sees me walk in, in my cycling shorts, and booms out, ‘A lovely day for cycling, no?'

‘It is, but the wind …' I reply.

‘It's the mistral,' he says. ‘What'd you expect?'

The mistral is one of the world's strongest winds, intermittently, but powerfully, blowing across southern France, including down the Rhône valley, causing every tree along it to grow bent; some of the people too, I imagine. I'd studied it fifteen years ago in school geography lessons but had obviously completely forgotten about it.

‘I'm English,' I say, as if that's a good enough explanation.

‘Ah yes, so many English move here. They come in summer when the wind is not so strong and fall in love,' he says. ‘Then autumn comes and they can't leave soon enough.' He doesn't stop laughing to himself for some time. When he finally does, he asks what on earth I'm doing on a bike in October.

‘That sounds like a great trip,' he says after I explain, ‘but why are you following the soldiers? They're not the story of “La Marseillaise”. They didn't write it. You should be going to the birthplace of, er …' He looks at his wife. ‘What's the name of the man who wrote “La Marseillaise”?'

‘How should I know?' she replies.

‘Rouget,' says the cafe's owner, looking up from behind the counter. ‘Oh yes, Rouget de Lisle. You should be going to wherever he was born.'

*

Claude Joseph Rouget de Lisle is the man who wrote ‘Le Chant de Guerre pour l'Armée du Rhin'. He did it in one night of genius. That word – ‘genius' – is rolled out to describe people far too often, but there's no question it's justified here. Rouget is the greatest one-hit wonder of all time. Listen to that melody. Read those words. You can't be just anyone and knock something like that out. But despite that, he's a man few people in France know about, let alone anyone from elsewhere. The only people who never forgot his name were other composers looking for a tune to borrow: Berlioz, Liszt, Rossini, Elgar, Schumann, Tchaikovsky, Debussy … the list of admirers is long.

Rouget was born in 1760 in the small town of Lons-le-Saunier in east France. It's the sort of place where the church dominates the landscape, the patisseries the social lives. Today, it's meant to be the centre of government for the department of Jura, but you'd hardly say the place is overrun with civil servants. It's quiet, feels almost half asleep, and in the 1700s it wouldn't have been much different, little more than a few muddy streets beneath the fat wooden steeple of the church.

Rouget's father was a lawyer and his mother, unsurprisingly for the time, was a housewife. For the first year of his life he was brought up in his father's office, a flat on the town's main street. But by the time he was two, he had moved to the family's house at Montaigu, a village on a hill nearby, where he grew up alongside six brothers and sisters, revelling in the fresh air and the space. Their house is still there, looking like a miniature stately home, its small front courtyard out of bounds behind padlocked iron gates.

Rouget wanted to be a musician. He played the piano, badly; the violin slightly better. But Rouget's dad was having none of it. It was the army or nothing. And so at the age of sixteen Rouget went off to Paris, alone, to military school. He did it with a new name, too. He'd been born simply Claude Joseph Rouget, but his dad bought the ‘de Lisle' so that his son appeared aristocratic, officer material (a common practice at the time if you had the money and wanted a boost in status). There's no record of how much it cost.

Rouget spent the next fifteen years being trained, drilled and then shifted around France, but he spent whatever spare time he had trying to impress girls with songs he had written. He probably didn't need to try very hard: he was handsome with swept-back blonde hair curling down to his neck and looked rather like a rugby player who'd avoided being tackled all his life. There's a statue of him in Lons-le-Saunier today, sculpted by Frédéric Bartholdi, the man who designed the Statue of Liberty. Rouget is depicted mid-song, one hand clasped to his breast, and cuts such a dashing figure that he puts the men who actually live in the town to shame.

Rouget would probably have simply trundled along in life, writing the occasional song and fighting the occasional battle, if he hadn't been in Strasbourg on the German border on the night of 25 April 1792. He was there, along with thousands of other soldiers, because France had just declared war on Austria – Louis XVI backing the decision because he thought it would improve his popularity; most others doing so because they wanted to stop Austria rolling back the Revolution and restoring powers to Louis. It was to be Rouget's first proper war – his good looks were under threat for the first time. He seems to have been respected in Strasbourg, though, as that night he was invited to the mayor's house for dinner.

Mayor Dietrich apparently spent the evening boring everyone with his repeated complaints that there wasn't a patriotic song good enough to get the troops excited. Until a thought crossed his mind: Rouget was a musician; why not ask him to write one?

Rouget told a French historian what happened next. ‘I went back to my room. I was slightly drunk, but I jumped to my violin, and with the first strikes of my bow those notes came. I had this fever. Sweat was pouring from me – it was soaking the floor – but I couldn't stop.'

There's a simple explanation for how he was able to write the words so quickly; he based some of them on the revolutionary slogans he'd heard shouted in the streets during the previous few years; others he literally stole from the revolutionary posters that were plastered to Strasbourg's walls. That's why the song is such a perfect summation of everything the French Revolution was about: blood, soil and the fatherland.

But that tune – there's no explanation for it apart from, again, genius. Well, there is: he could have stolen it. Some historians are adamant that Rouget didn't do any composing, let alone sweating, that night; that all he did was tweak a well-known tune from the time. But they have no proof. And even if that were the case, just choosing that melody – knowing that it was the one to inspire – there's art in that too. You only have to look at other anthems to realise that. Dozens were written in similar circumstances – when a country was under threat or at war – but none match ‘La Marseillaise' as they should if songwriting was such an easy task.

I don't just mean famous anthems like ‘The Star-Spangled Banner' or China's ‘March of the Volunteers' (more on both in later chapters). Take Bulgaria's ‘Dear Motherland', written by a teacher, Tsvetan Radoslavov, as he marched to defend his country from a Serbian invasion. ‘Bulgarian brothers, let's go / … a heroic battle is approaching, / for freedom, justice,' read the lyrics to a plodding tune that can't make up its mind whether it's a hymn or a march. It's hardly ‘
Aux armes, citoyens!
'

Romania's ‘Wake Up, Romanian!' fares somewhat better. It was written by a poet, Andrei Mure
ş
ianu, during his country's 1848 revolution against the Habsburg Empire – the same empire Rouget had been about to fight. ‘Now or never, make a new fate for yourself, / To which even your cruel enemies will bow,' goes the first verse, and Andrei goes on to repeat that trick of using an insistent ‘now' again and again. ‘Now the cruel ones are trying … / To take away our language,' goes a later verse. ‘Now or never, unite in feeling,' adds one more. ‘“Life in freedom or death!” shout all.' It's stirring, certainly – it apparently caused thousands to rebel – but it was commonly known as ‘the Romanian Marseillaise' and that says it all. If it were anywhere near as good as what Rouget created, no comparison would have been needed.

No, what Rouget did on the night of 25 April is unparalleled among anthems.

The next morning Rouget took the song to Mayor Dietrich. He loved it. Just as importantly, Mayor Dietrich's wife loved it and worked up a proper arrangement on her clavichord. That night the mayor sang it at another gathering. Everyone there loved it too. Before Rouget had time to think, the song was printed up, and put in the hands of newspaper editors and town criers to ensure it reached the armies along the front. Just days after he'd written it, the song was out of Rouget's hands for ever, spreading all over France, and down to Marseilles where it found its way into the welcoming arms of 517 men in particular. That doesn't explain why Rouget's name has disappeared from history, of course. That requires a whole list of reasons, which could fairly be titled ‘Rouget's Many, Many Mistakes'.

*

In August 1792, less than four months later, Rouget was suspended from the army and labelled a ‘traitor to the fatherland' for refusing to follow the orders of the new, soon-to-be-republican regime. A year after that, at the start of Robespierre's Terror which tore through Paris, he was thrown in prison for allegedly being a royalist. He spent almost a year in there, escaping the guillotine partly because he wrote an awful song to back up his claim to be a true republican. In it, darkness covers the universe and ‘impure vapours' take the throne, presumably a reference to Louis XVI, then there are the words ‘It rolls …', the most undramatic reference to a king's head being cut off you could ever come across.

Rouget was released in 1794, and surprisingly soon let back into the army. Then, a year later, his song became the official national anthem of France – the victory song of the Revolution. But Rouget couldn't walk around Paris milking the achievement, celebrated as the author of one of the world's most famous songs (by that point, it had travelled to the US as well as most of Europe). Once a person was labelled a royalist in revolutionary France, it took a long time to shake off the label. He had to just sit on his hands, do as he was told and bide his time. He got a poor job liaising with the Dutch embassy in Paris.

His life should have got better with the rise of Napoleon, and indeed for a while it looked as though things for him might be getting back on track. He was close to Napoleon's wife, Josephine (there were rumours of an affair), and she nudged her husband until one day he gave Rouget extra work, asking him to ferry gifts to the Spanish royal family like a cut-price ambassador (Josephine used Rouget's appointment to commit fraud, getting him to take Parisian novelties with him so she could avoid export taxes).