On April 25, 1792, the Frenchman Claude-Joseph Roger de Lille composed the music and lyrics of the Marseillaise. The song is the national anthem of France since 1795.
It was written by Claude-Joseph Roger de Lille on the night of April 25-26, 1792, after Austria declared war on France. The original name of the hymn was “March of the Army of the Rhine”. The song became a collective signal of the French Revolution and was first heard on the streets of Paris on July 30, 1792, sung by units of the French National Guard arriving from Marseille, from where its name derives.
The Marseillaise was so successful in the time after the French Revolution that on July 14, 1795 it was declared the national anthem.
It was subsequently banned successively by Napoleon Bonaparte, Louis XVIII and Napoleon III. It was briefly restored after the July Revolution of 1830, and finally became the national anthem after 1879.
It was revised by Hector Berlioz in 1830. The Marseillaise is confirmed as the anthem of France with the constitutions of 1946 and 1958.
In 1917, after the fall of the tsarist regime, both the Marseillaise and the Internationale were used as national anthems of Russia.
The song was banned by the Vichy regime in France and the Third Reich-occupied areas during World War II, and singing it was an act of resistance.
We recall that in 1793 Roger de Lille was imprisoned during the terror of the Jacobins and was released only after the counter-revolution in 1795. It is a historical irony that the commander of the Army of the Rhine during the French Revolution was a Bavarian by origin.