It was composed in the evening of 25/26 April 1792 and given the title Chant de guerre pour l’armée du Rhin (War Song of the Army of the Rhine), before becoming the Hymne des Marseillais (The Hymn of the People of Marseilles) then just simply La Marseillaise after it was adopted by the Fédérés of that eponymous city as they came up to Paris in the July of the same year. This piece by the composer Claude-Joseph Rouget de l’Isle (1760-1836) is said to have been “banned” by Napoleon. That however is not really correct.
It is true he didn’t like the piece. It reminded him too much of 10 August 1792 and the massacre of the Swiss guard (at which he was a horrified onlooker). But he certainly never banned it. In 1797, during the First Italian Campaign, he forbade Berthier from having the music played during military reviews, but he never stopped it from being sounded during attacks on the battlefield. Later, after coming to power, even though he didn’t like the words, he put up with the piece being played anywhere in the army; provided he wasn’t there. La Marseillaise was removed from the list of regulatory fanfares, but it was nevertheless played by the Garde Impériale band at the start of the Battle of Waterloo, the moment when it was important to link the soldiers of 1815 with their forefathers of the mass conscription against the European coalition of more than twenty years earlier. So, despite fifteen years on the back burner, no formal edict of prohibition was ever proclaimed, unlike during the Second Empire, when the La Marseillaise became a rallying cry for Republican in opposition.
Napoleon much preferred other military music, such as: Le Chant du départ, by Etienne-Nicolas Méhul, the Marche consulaire, by the bandmaster Guillardel, and Veillons au salut de l’Empire, words written by the surgeon Adrien-Simon Boy in 1791 and set by him to an aria tune from the opera Renaud d’Ast by Nicolas Dalayrac (1787).
It also should be said that Napoleon did not much like Rouget de l’Isle the man. Rouget was a cashiered soldier acting as an embassy clerk in Holland at the moment of the Brumaire coup d’état. But he was fortunate to have the protection of Carnot, the Talliens, and Josephine. The latter, whom he had known since the height of the Revolution, was even suspected (wrongly) of having been his mistress. It looked like it was all going swimmingly. The First Consul commissioned a “chant Guerrier” (warlike song) from him in March 1800. The piece was called Chant des combats (Battle song) but it met with no success whatsoever and was quickly forgotten. So, bitterly, the composer set about pestering the authorities for commissions, in vain, and then wrote aggressive letters to the head of state criticising his statecraft. He then went into business, convincing Josephine to invest in a real estate scheme with the Goisson Company, one of whose business arms was supplying the Spanish army. This too was a failure. Goisson took Rouget to court, and the latter found no better defence than to implicate Madame Bonaparte. That being said, Josephine had not been wise, either in her support of the speculation or in recommending her associates to several ministers. Once the affair had been settled out of court, the composer of the La Marseillaise could expect nothing more from his erstwhile protectors, and even that didn’t stop him from pestering the authorities for a job. On not getting one, he became ever more disenchanted, ending up by writing political pamphlets criticising the regime. He eked out an existence up to the end of the Empire translating English texts into French and writing prefaces for the books of others. He rallied to Louis XVIII but found no more support from that regime than he had had from the Empire, despite having decked his writings out in the best militant Royalist colours. He had to wait until the accession of Louis-Philippe to come back into favour, when the bourgeois King remembered that the La Marseillaise had been the song of the Revolutionary armies in which he had fought in 1792.
The final irony of history is that Rouget de l’Isle’s coffin was transferred to the Invalides in July 1915, awaiting transfer to the Pantheon. But since the law requiring that transfer has not yet been passed, his mortal remains still lie in the Governors’ Crypt, only a few metres away from those of the Emperor.
(translation PH)