Republic or Death! (6 page)

Lahouari says all this despite being French himself. He chose to become French after qualifying on residency. ‘I respect my country, my new country. I respect the people, the French way of life. And I am grateful for them. I want to belong to this national community and I would like to be faithful. But “La Marseillaise” is a problem. It's impossible. It's the line about “
sang impur
”, impure blood, that's the biggest issue,' he adds. Lahouari knows it refers to the people in the eighteenth century, but so many see it as referring to immigrants today: ‘I wish it would be changed,' he says. I ask how long that could take. ‘Maybe fifty years.'

I bring up the subject of Algeria's anthem, a song called ‘Kassaman' (‘We Pledge' in English). It was written by a poet, Mufdi Zakariah, while he was imprisoned by the French for calling for independence and it's every bit as brutal as ‘La Marseillaise'. ‘We pledge … / That we'll rise to revolution in life or death,' it says:

The drum of gunpowder is our rhythm,

The sound of machine guns our melody.

By the third verse it's shouting, ‘Oh France, the day of reckoning is at hand.' Many Algerians believe Mufdi wrote it using his own blood on his cell walls.

The anthems of other former French colonies don't come anywhere near to the vitriol of ‘Kassaman'. Tunisia's ‘Defenders of the Homeland' tries – ‘The blood surges in our veins, / We die for the sake of our land,' runs the chorus – but it never says anything specific against the French. Others hardly mention the struggle for independence at all, preferring to fill their lines with thoughts of the future and the sort of bland statements usually reserved for greetings cards. ‘We salute you, O land of hope,' goes ‘L'Abidjanaise', Côte d'Ivoire's anthem. ‘Let us live our motto: / Unity, work, progress,' adds the Republic of Congo's ‘La Congolaise'. Mali's simply says, ‘At your call, Mali, / for your prosperity'.

I read some of the lyrics of ‘Kassaman' to Lahouari. ‘Isn't that worse than “La Marseillaise”?' I ask.

‘No, it's just an anthem,' he says.

But it keeps on saying you'll kill the French, I tell him. It's much worse than ‘La Marseillaise' in that sense. ‘La Marseillaise' doesn't actually mention any Algerians. Lahouari asks for the translation of ‘Kassaman' I have. He reads it through once, twice, smiling occasionally as if remembering treasured lines he'd forgotten. ‘No, I don't see it,' he says, finally. ‘It doesn't say, “The French are inferior.” It says we are enemies, sure. It says we have to kick the French out of Algeria. But that's all.'

I look at him slightly aghast. He picks up the words again. ‘I'm sorry, but what's so strong here?'

He smiles, then adds: ‘Let me tell you something that may seem ironic. The idea of “Kassaman” was taken from France. The idea of a national anthem is European. It's not from Muslim countries. The only reason we have one is because of colonialism.' And with that, he gets up, gulps down the remainder of his coffee and shakes my hand, the argument apparently won. By the time he's out of the door, I realise he's right: the fact Algeria's anthem calls for a few French heads is nothing compared with one that helped subjugate a country and is still sung by some, no matter how few, with the hope they could do it again. You can't ever separate these songs from their context. The fact so many anthems lust for blood is also really Rouget de Lisle's fault, for proving you can make such cries catchy. I'm about to run after Lahouari to apologise, until I realise he's left me with the bill.

*

Lyon is severely underrated, and I can only think that this is because it's a business city. The Rhône runs through it, but its sunlit banks aren't for strolling along, hand in hand with a lover, like Paris's Seine; they're for joggers. The old town with its
traboules
– hidden passageways darting under and through buildings – isn't for tourists to gawp at; it's for gourmet ice-cream parlours and restaurants experimenting in molecular gastronomy, a treat for people who've spent their week earning sufficient money to visit them. The city doesn't have art galleries like the Louvre or Pompidou Centre – stuffed with masterpieces, their names recognised worldwide; instead most of its art seems to sit on the fringes, in warehouses which could just as well be furniture shops.

But for all that, it's a city with a lot of charm, not least because when you stumble across something unexpected among its sprawl – tower blocks whose sides have been painted with Chinese dragon fantasies, or a restaurant that only sells dishes made from blood sausage – it stands out and stays with you. One of the shortest chats I had with anyone about ‘La Marseillaise' during my entire time in France took place in Lyon. But it's also one of the most memorable for that same unexpectedness. I was outside the Basilica of Notre-Dame de Fourvière, the gothic church that stands on the city's hill, and saw a priest filling up his car boot with bibles while kids skateboard around him. He had gap teeth and hair that stood out in clumps (I presumed it had been cut by another priest). I approached him, expecting him to fail to understand my French, or I his, or for him not to want to talk to a random man in biking gear, but he took me asking about ‘La Marseillaise' as easily as taking a confession.

‘I don't sing it because the words are an insult,' he said. ‘You know the history of the French Revolution? For the Catholic Church that was a time of persecution. It's not the glorious page in the history of France everyone says it is. There are other pages you could choose to have a song about. “La Marseillaise”, it's childish. That's how I feel every time I hear it sung. I love France, but I'd like a different hymn.' He got in his car but then wound down the window. ‘I like the music though,' he said.

That, at least, seems to be something everyone agrees on.

*

A few days later I'm on the outskirts of Paris, having taken the train to the final place the marchers stopped at before entering the capital: Charenton-le-Pont. Today it's a suburb that smells of wealth, where children play in the park and the churchyard is bustling with young families (the church has carved above its door the revolutionary line ‘
Republique Française: Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité
'). The area is full of those four-or five-storey apartment blocks that line every Parisian street, but here none are tatty; they are all in pristine sandstone looking as if they could happily be sitting alongside the Louvre.

Charenton is only twenty minutes from the middle of Paris by
Métro
, with little more than a ring road, a cemetery and an incinerator separating it from the city itself. But in 1792, on 29 July, it was a separate town. The marchers stopped here, preparing themselves to march into the capital, hoping they'd be welcomed as heroes and saviours. They were. ‘Male and female … met them with bravos and hand-clapping in crowded streets,' a historian wrote. ‘The Mother-Society [the Jacobins] came out as far as the Bastille-ground to embrace them, and they wended onwards, triumphant, to the town hall to be embraced by the mayor, to put down their muskets in the Barracks of Nouveau France, then towards the appointed tavern in the Champs-Élysées to enjoy a frugal patriot repast.'

Cycling along the route they took through the city is at times magnificent, past 20-metre-high columns topped with gold statues, through grand squares and boulevards, past
Métro
stations whose names seem to ring with revolutionary history: Liberté, Nation, Bastille. Okay, you also have to go along a few streets clogged with grimy cafes and teenagers practising karate in makeshift dojos, with men leaning out of apartment windows smoking dope, but it's not hard to imagine how those soldiers must have felt back then: like they were being given the keys to the city; like they were taking it for Marseilles.

In truth, the Marseillais men weren't treated with much love at first by the Paris authorities, and were split up and shunted between barracks. No one knew what to do with them – they arrived right in the middle of the tensest time of the Revolution, when things were coming to a head between the royalists and revolutionaries, with some very confused people stuck in the middle of it all. On 8 August, Paris's local government announced they would storm the king's palace – the Tuileries, where the royal family had been effectively under house arrest ever since their attempt to flee – unless the king's dethronement was announced. He didn't step down, obviously, leaving the Legislative Assembly, the French parliament, in a state of utter indecision. They wanted change – almost everyone in Paris did – but few of them actually wanted the king's removal and the establishment of a republic.

The decision was soon taken out of their hands. The next day, at midnight, an insurrectionary government known as the Paris Commune was set up. The churches rang their bells as an alarm and all the revolutionaries who'd been prepared for that signal began to march on the palace, emerging from the slums and workshops and bars, and crossing the bridges over the Seine. They'd had enough of the king. They blamed him for bankrupting the country. They blamed him for crop failures. They blamed him for the fact they were poor and hungry. Austria, the home of his wife, was an urgent threat. The king just had to be removed.

And who was at the head of these marchers? The Marseillais, of course, their red hats and their boisterous singing marking them out to everyone. If you hadn't known they were in town already, you did now.

King Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette didn't know what to do. They sat in the palace, while advisor after advisor gave contradictory recommendations and Louis tried to reach a decision. ‘
Marchons, marchons
,' he apparently said at last, an odd choice of words given the chorus of ‘La Marseillaise'. He meant it as an instruction to leave the palace and go to the one remaining place in the city that even offered a chance of safety: the Legislative Assembly. And so king and queen and children got in a carriage surrounded by ranks of gunmen, just enough to protect them, and somehow barged their way out before the revolutionaries arrived.

The Marseillais found out they had left as soon as they reached the Tuileries. But it didn't stop them wanting to storm the building and occupy it to make sure the king could never come back. The palace was guarded by 950 Swiss Guards – in brightly coloured, ballooning trousers, armed with pikes and blunderbusses. The Swiss had been protecting the royals for centuries, and their outfits were meant to look proud, but at the height of that moment they must have looked like an insult to the Marseillais, like the very ‘
sang impur
' they'd sung about over and over again during their twenty-eight-day march. The Marseillais pleaded with them to leave, and when that didn't work they tried swinging their swords around, mocking them and begging. ‘A pantomime', it's been called. But then, depending on whom you believe, either the Marseillais fired their cannons or the Swiss opened fire. The fighting began. The Swiss Guards were soon overwhelmed, hundreds of them quickly cut down. Others ran for freedom, but were chased and caught. They were dragged through the streets, savagely beaten to death. It was like the chorus of ‘La Marseillaise' made flesh.

However, the actual events of 10 August aren't as important as the myth created that day, of men who gave their lives for liberty. The battle was not a battle. It was a rout, like a football crowd tearing through a city centre flipping cars. Only twenty of the Marseillais died, and that's not because they were brilliant fighters beating off opponents; it's because their side was overwhelmingly the stronger.

As soon as the battle was over, though, the storytelling began and the magnificence of the act grew with each telling until the truth no longer mattered. All the people of France knew was that a few hundred young men from Marseilles led the charge. Brave and courageous, they brought down the king. And as they did so, they sang a song. It didn't matter that they hadn't brought the king down at all or that they didn't have any hand in what happened next: the king being arrested almost as soon as he got to the Legislative Assembly; France becoming a republic a month later; Louis and Marie Antoinette losing their heads soon after that. The story was better than fact.

Word of the Marseillais soldiers soon spread south and everyone started claiming they knew them. People in Sens, Auxerre, Chalon, Tournus, all the places the Marseillais had marched through: all started asking each other, ‘Don't you remember when they came through here? I told you they'd save this country,' regardless of whether they had seen them or not. Everyone wanted to have borne witness. The fact that some of the Marseillais passed back through these places on their way home certainly helped build the myth, and banquets and spectacles were put on for them in many of the places they went.

There are no signs of the Revolution around the Tuileries today. Only the palace's gardens remain (the palace itself was burned to the ground in 1871), a place tourists stop for an ice cream in between visiting the Louvre and the Arc de Triomphe. Deckchairs are provided, and somehow never stolen.

It's a sunny morning when I arrive and I decide to have a triumphant sing of the anthem. It feels the appropriate thing to do – the way to mark finishing the trip – and unlike my previous attempt I'm confident I can actually get through the whole thing. I start singing and quickly draw bemused looks from the tourists passing by. It's unsurprising. This is what ‘La Marseillaise' has become in much of the world – a novelty, a song simply to mean ‘France' in films and adverts and on stadium loudspeakers. And here's an exhausted Englishman standing in far-too-tight shorts, singing in bad French. I've probably made a few people's day. But even if I were singing to an audience of French schoolchildren I doubt the reaction would be much different, since the more people I've spoken to, the more I've realised the song has lost much of the power it once had.