France's anthem was written in one Strasbourg evening and named for Marseille
On 25 April 1792 the mayor of Strasbourg asked a guest to write a song to rally soldiers against invading armies. Claude Joseph Rouget de Lisle finished it that same evening as a war song for the Army of the Rhine. Volunteers from Marseille later carried it to Paris, and their city's name stuck.
France had declared war on Austria, Coalition armies were crossing the border, and Strasbourg itself came under attack days later. Rouget de Lisle, a fellow Freemason of the mayor Philippe Friedrich Dietrich, dedicated the piece to Marshal Nicolas Luckner. The mayor did not enjoy the song's success for long: he was executed during the Terror the following year. Because most Alsatians spoke no French, a German version was printed in Colmar that autumn.
The nickname came from the south. François Mireur, a young volunteer from Montpellier, sang it at a patriotic meeting in Marseille, the local National Guard took it up as a marching song, and the fédérés sang it all the way into Paris, arriving on 30 July 1792. Mireur, a freshly qualified doctor, later became one of Napoleon's generals and died in Egypt aged 28.
Official status came and went with the regimes. The Convention made it France's first anthem on 14 July 1795; Napoleon dropped it, Louis XVIII and Charles X banned it, and it returned only briefly after 1830. It was revived to stir the nation in the Franco-Prussian War, adopted with new words by the Paris Commune, and finally restored as the anthem in 1879. Abroad it became a hymn of revolution, sung in Korea's March First protests in 1919 and serving as a semi-official anthem of Russia's short-lived republic in 1917.
Composers kept quoting it. Berlioz arranged it and Liszt transcribed it; Schumann slipped it into a piano piece when singing it was banned in Austria; Tchaikovsky let cannon fire drown it in his 1812 Overture, and the Beatles opened All You Need Is Love with it. Not everyone admired it: Jeremy Bentham found the tune dismal and flat, and a 1992 campaign to soften its bloodthirsty lyrics failed.
Source: La Marseillaise
