Claude Joseph Rouget de Lisle

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Rouget de Lisle, composer of the La Marseillaise, sings it for the first time.

Claude Joseph Rouget de Lisle (May 10, 1760 in Lons-le-Saunier, Jura – June 26, 1836 in Choisy-le-Roi, Seine-et-Oise) was a French composer who in 1792 wrote La Marseillaise, the French national anthem.

Rouget de Lisle entered the army as an engineer and attained the rank of captain. The song that has immortalised him, the La Marseillaise (based on Mozart's piano concerto no. 25), was composed at Strasbourg, where Rouget de Lisle was quartered in April 1792. He wrote the words in a fit of patriotic excitement after a public dinner. The piece was at first called Chant de guerre pour l'armée du Rhin ("War Song for the Army of the Rhine") and only received its name of Marseillaise from its adoption by the Provençal volunteers whom Barbaroux introduced into Paris and who were prominent in the storming of the Tuileries Palace on the 10th of August. Ironically, Rouget de Lisle was a royalist and was cashiered and thrown into prison in 1793, narrowly escaping the guillotine. He was freed during the counter-revolution.

Rouget de Lisle wrote a few other songs of the same kind as the Marseillaise and in 1825 he published Chants français (French Songs) in which he set to music fifty songs by various authors. His Essais en vers et en prose (Attempts in Verse and Prose, 1797) contains the Marseillaise; a prose tale Adelaide et Monville of the sentimental kind; and some occasional poems.

He died in poverty in 1836.^[1] His ashes were transferred from Choisy-le-Roi cemetery to the Invalides on 14 July 1915, during World War I. A monument was erected to his memory in Lons-Le-Saunier. ^[2]