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The genius of a night | |
The Marseillaise, April 25, 1792 | |
The genius of one night | |
In 1792, two months, three months already, the French National Assembly is wavering over the decision: war against the coalition of emperors and kings or peace. Louis XVI is himself undecided; he senses the danger of a victory for the revolutionaries, he senses the danger of their defeat. The parties are also uncertain. The Girondists are pushing for war to retain power, Robespierre and the Jacobins are fighting for peace to seize power themselves in the meantime. Day by day the situation becomes more tense, the journals clamor, the clubs discuss, ever wilder the rumors buzz, and ever more public opinion is aroused by them. As always a decision, it therefore becomes a kind of liberation, as on April 20 the King of France finally declares war on the Emperor of Austria and the King of Prussia. | |
During these weeks and weeks the electric tension has lain over Paris, weighing heavily and disturbing the soul; but the excitement in the border towns is even more oppressive, even more threatening. Troops are already assembled in all bivouacs, volunteers and national guards are being equipped in every village, in every town, fortifications are being repaired everywhere, and especially in Alsace it is known that on its soil, as always between France and Germany, the first decision will be made. On the banks of the Rhine, the enemy, the adversary, is not, as in Paris, a blurred, a pathetic-rhetorical concept, but a visible, sensuous presence; for at the fortified bridgehead, from the tower of the cathedral, the approaching Prussian regiments can be perceived with the naked eye. At night the wind carries the rolling of the enemy artillery wagons, the clanking of weapons, the trumpet signals across the stream glittering indifferently in the moonlight. And everyone knows: only one word, only one decree is needed, and from the silent mouth of the Prussian cannons thunder and lightning will fly, and the thousand-year struggle between Germany and France will have begun once again - this time in the name of the new freedom on the one side and in the name of the old order on the other. | |
It was an incomparable day when, on April 25, 1792, the news of the declaration of war was brought from Paris to Strasbourg by convoys. Immediately the people streamed out of all the streets and houses into the open squares, ready for war the whole garrison marched to the last parade, regiment after regiment. On the main square, Mayor Dietrich awaits them, the tricolor sash around his body, the cockade on his hat, which he waves in greeting to the soldiers. The call of the fanfare and the roll of the drums call for silence. In a loud voice, Dietrich reads the text of the declaration of war in French and German in this and all other places in the city. After his last words the regimental musicians intoned the first, the preliminary war song of the revolution, the "Ça ira", actually a sparkling, high-spirited, mocking dance melody, but the clashing, the thundering steps of the marching out regiments gave it a martial beat. Then the crowd disperses, carrying the fanned enthusiasm into all the alleys and houses; in the cafes, in the clubs, inflammatory speeches are made and proclamations distributed. "Aux armes, citoyens! L'étendard de la guerre est déployé! Le signal est donné!"; thus and with similar calls they begin, and everywhere, in all the speeches, in all the newspapers, on all the posters, on all the lips, are repeated such punchy, rhythmic cries as "Aux armes, citoyens!". Qu'ils tremblent donc, les despotes couronnés! Marchons, enfants de la liberté!", and each time the masses cheer and cheer to the fiery words. | |
The great masses in the streets and squares always cheer when war is declared, but other voices, quieter, more distant voices, always stir in such moments of street jubilation; fear, too, worry, too, wakes up at a declaration of war, only it whispers secretly in the parlors or remains silent with a pale lip. Eternally and everywhere are mothers who say to themselves: Will the foreign soldiers not murder my children; in all countries are the peasants who worry about their possessions, their fields, their huts, their cattle and their harvest. Will not their seed be trampled, their house plundered by the brutal hordes, not fertilized with blood the fields of their labors? But the mayor of Strasbourg, Frederick Baron Dietrich, actually an aristocrat, but like the best aristocracy of France at that time devoted to the cause of the new freedom with all his soul, wants only the loud, the ringing voices of confidence to speak; consciously he turns the day of the declaration of war into a public celebration. With his sash across his chest, he hurried from one meeting to another to cheer the people. He distributes wine and food to the departing soldiers, and in the evening he gathers the generals, the officers and the most important officials in his spacious house on the Place de Broglie for a farewell party, to which the enthusiasm already gives the character of a victory celebration. The generals, confident of victory as always generals, preside, the young officers, who see in the war the meaning of their lives fulfilled, have free word. One cheers the other. They swing their sabers, they embrace, they drink to each other, they make passionate and increasingly passionate speeches over good wine. And again the same stimulating words of the journals and proclamations recur in all the speeches: "To arms, citizens! Let us march! Let us save the fatherland! Soon they will tremble, the crowned despots. Now that the flag of victory has unfurled, the day has come to carry the tricolor over the world! Everyone must give his best now, for the king, for the flag, for freedom!" The whole people, the whole country at such moments wants to become a sacred unity through faith in victory and enthusiasm for the cause of freedom. | |
Suddenly, in the midst of talking and toasting, Mayor Dietrich turned to a young captain from the fortress corps, named Rouget, sitting at his side. He remembered that half a year ago, on the occasion of the proclamation of the Constitution, this nice officer, not exactly handsome but sympathetic, had written a rather nice hymn to liberty, which the regimental musician Pleyel immediately set to music. The unpretentious work had proved to be singable, the military band had learned it, it had been played in the public square and sung in the choir. Wouldn't the declaration of war and the departure be a good occasion to stage a similar celebration? So Mayor Dietrich casually asks, as one would ask a good acquaintance for a favor, Captain Rouget (who has quite unjustifiably ennobled himself and calls himself Rouget de Lisle), whether he would not like to take advantage of the patriotic occasion and compose something for the marching troops, a war song for the Rhine army, which is to march out against the enemy tomorrow. | |
Rouget, a modest, insignificant man who never considered himself a great composer - his verses were never printed, his operas refüsiert - knows that occasional verses flow easily into his pen. To please the high official and the good friend, he declares himself ready. Yes, he wants to try. "Bravo, Rouget," a general from across the street drinks to him and admonishes him that he should then immediately send the song after him into the field; the Rhine Army could really use some step-winging, patriotic marching song. In the meantime, someone else begins to make a speech. Again there is toasting, noise, drinking. With a strong wave the general enthusiasm goes over the small coincidental dialogue. The revelry becomes more and more ecstatic, louder and louder, more and more frenetic, and the hour is already precariously late after midnight, when the guests leave the mayor's house. | |
It is late after midnight. April 25, the day of the declaration of war, which was so exciting for Strasbourg, has come to an end; in fact, April 26 has already begun. Nightly darkness lies over the houses; but this darkness is deceptive, for the city is still feverish with excitement. In the barracks, the soldiers are preparing to march out, and some of the cautious ones are perhaps already secretly fleeing behind closed shutters. In the streets, individual peletons march, the clattering hooves of the dispatch riders hunt between them, then another heavy platoon of artillery rattles up, and again and again the call of the shield guard echoes monotonously from post to post. The enemy is too close, the soul of the city too uncertain and too excited to find sleep at such a decisive moment. | |
Rouget, who has now climbed the circular staircase to his modest little room at 126 Grande Rue, also feels strangely aroused. He has not forgotten his promise to attempt as quickly as possible a marching song, a war song for the Rhine Army. Restlessly he trudges up and down his narrow room. How to begin? How to begin? All the cheering shouts of the proclamations, the speeches, the toasts are still whirring chaotically through his mind. "Aux armes, citoyens! ... Marchons, enfants de la liberté! ... Ecrasons la tyrannie! ... L'étendard de la guerre est déployé! ..." But he also remembers the other words he heard in passing, the voices of women trembling for their sons, the concern of the peasants that France's fields might be trampled and fertilized with blood by the foreign cohorts. Half unconsciously, he writes down the first two lines, which are only echoes, reverberations, repetitions of those calls. | |
"Allons, enfants de la patrie, | |
Le jour de gloire est arrivé!" | |
Then he pauses and pauses. It sits. The approach is good. Now just find the right rhythm, the melody to the words. He takes his violin from the cabinet, tries it out. And wonderful: in the very first bars, the rhythm adapts perfectly to the words. Hastily he continues to write, now already carried along, now already carried away by the power that has entered him. And all at once everything flows together: all the feelings that are discharged in this hour, all the words that he heard on the street, that he heard at the banquet, the hatred against the tyrants, the fear for the native soil, the confidence for victory, the love for freedom. Rouget does not even need to write poetry, to invent, he only needs to put into rhyme, into the ravishing rhythm of his melody, the words that today, on this single day, have passed from mouth to mouth, and he has spoken everything, said everything, sung everything that the nation felt in its innermost soul. And he does not need to compose, because through the closed shutters penetrates the rhythm of the street, of the hour, this rhythm of defiance and challenge, which lies in the marching of the soldiers, the blare of the trumpets, the rattle of the cannons. Perhaps he does not hear it himself, not his own alert ear, but the genius of the hour, who has taken up residence in his mortal body for this single night, has heard it. And more and more docilely the melody obeys the hammering, the jubilant beat, which is the heartbeat of a whole people. As if under foreign dictation, Rouget hastily and ever more hastily writes down the words, the notes - a storm has come over him, such as has never raged through his narrow bourgeois soul. An exaltation, an enthusiasm that is not his own, but magical force, concentrated into a single explosive second, sweeps the poor dilettante a hundred thousand times beyond his own measure and hurls him like a rocket - for a second light and radiant flame - to the stars. One night it is granted to Lieutenant-Captain Rouget de Lisle to be brother of the immortals: from the adopted shouts of the beginning, borrowed from the street, from the journals, creative word forms itself to him and rises to a stanza which in its poetic formulation is as immortal as the melody is immortal. | |
"Amour sacré de la patrie, | |
Conduis, soutiens nos bras vengeurs, | |
Liberté, liberté chérie, | |
Combats avec tes défenseurs." | |
Then a fifth stanza, the last, and formed from one excitement and in one cast, perfectly uniting the word of the melody, the immortal song is completed before dawn. Rouget extinguishes the light and lies down on his bed. Something, he does not know what, has lifted him up into a never felt brightness of his senses, something now hurls him down into a dull exhaustion. He sleeps an abysmal sleep, which is like a death. And indeed the creator, the poet, the genius in him has died again. But on the table, detached from the sleeper, whom this miracle truly overcomes in holy intoxication, lies the completed work. Hardly a second time in the history of all peoples and times has a song become word and music so quickly and so perfectly at the same time. | |
The same bells from the minster as always announce the new morning. Now and then the wind carries shots from the Rhine, the first skirmishes have begun. Rouget wakes up. With difficulty he gropes his way up from the abyss of his sleep. Something has happened, he feels dully, something has happened to him that he remembers only dully. Only then does he notice the freshly written page on the table. Verses? When did I write these? Music, in my own handwriting? When did I compose that? Oh yes, the song that friend Dietrich asked for yesterday, the marching song for the Rhine army! Rouget reads his verses, hums the melody to it, but feels, as always the creator before the just created work, completely uncertain. But next door lives a regimental comrade, to whom he shows and sings it. The friend seems satisfied and suggests only a few minor changes. Rouget gains a certain confidence from this first approval. With all the impatience of an author and proud of his quickly fulfilled promise, he immediately falls in with Mayor Dietrich, who is taking his morning walk in the garden, meditating on a new speech. How, Rouget? Already ready? Well, let's have a rehearsal right away. The two walk out of the garden into the parlor of the house, Dietrich sits down at the piano and plays the accompaniment, Rouget sings the text. Attracted by the unexpected morning music, the mayor's wife comes into the room and promises to make copies of the new song and, being a trained musician, to work out the accompaniment right away, so that it can be sung to the friends of the house among all sorts of other songs at the evening party tonight. The mayor Dietrich, proud of his nice tenor voice, took it upon himself to study the song more thoroughly, and on April 26, in the evening of the same day, in the morning hours of which the song was composed, it was sung for the first time to a randomly chosen company in the mayor's salon. | |
The audience seems to have applauded kindly, and probably there was no lack of all kinds of polite compliments for the present author. But, of course, not the slightest inkling came over the guests of the Hôtel de Broglie in the great square of Strasbourg that with invisible wings an eternal melody had swooped down into their earthly presence. Rarely do contemporaries comprehend at first sight the greatness of a man or the greatness of a work, and how little the Lady Mayoress became aware of that amazing moment she proves with the letter to her brother in which she trivializes a miracle into a social event. "You know that we receive many people in the house and it is always necessary to invent something to bring variety to the entertainment. And so my husband had the idea of having some occasional song composed. The captain of the Corps of Engineers, Rouget de Lisle, a kind poet and composer, very quickly made this music of a war song. My husband, who has a good tenor voice, immediately sang the piece, which is very attractive and shows a certain peculiarity. It is a better Gluck, more lively and animated. For my part, I applied my talent for orchestration to it and arranged the score for piano and other instruments, so I have a lot to work with. The piece has been played in our house, to the great satisfaction of the whole company." | |
"To the great satisfaction of the whole society" - that seems surprisingly cool to us today. But the merely friendly impression, the merely lukewarm approval is understandable, for the Marseillaise has not yet been able to truly reveal its power in this first performance. The Marseillaise is not a recital piece for a comfortable tenor voice and is not meant to be performed in a petty bourgeois salon between romances and Italian arias with a single singing voice. A song that roars to the pounding, bouncing, demanding bars of "Aux armes, citoyens" addresses a mass, a crowd, and its true orchestration is clashing arms, blaring fanfares, marching regiments. It was not meant for listeners, for the coolly seated and comfortably enjoying, but for accomplices, fellow fighters. It was not sung to a single soprano or tenor, but to the thousand-throated masses, the exemplary marching song, victory song, death song, homeland song, national song of an entire people. Only enthusiasm, from which it was first born, will give Rouget's song its inspiring power. The song has not yet ignited, the words have not yet magically resonated, the melody has not yet reached the soul of the nation, the army does not yet know its marching song, its victory song, the revolution does not yet know its eternal paean. | |
Even he himself, to whom this miracle happened overnight, Rouget de Lisle, has as little idea as the others what he created in that one night, somnambulistically and guided by a faithless genius. He is of course heartily pleased, the good, amiable dilettante, that the invited guests applaud vigorously, that he is politely complimented as an author. With the small vanity of a small person, he seeks to make diligent use of this small success in his small provincial circle. He sings the new melody to his comrades in the coffee houses, he has copies made and sends them to the generals of the Rhine army. In the meantime, on the order of the mayor and the recommendation of the military authorities, the Strasbourg music corps rehearsed the "War Song for the Army of the Rhine", and four days later, at the departure of the troops, the music corps of the Strasbourg National Guard played the new march in the large square. In patriotic fashion, the Strasbourg publisher also agrees to print the "Chant de guerre pour l'armée du Rhin", which is respectfully dedicated to General Luckner by his military subordinate. But not a single one of the generals of the Rhine army thinks of actually having the new tune played or sung during the advance, and so, like all Rouget's previous attempts, the salon success of "Allons, enfants de la patrie" seems to remain a one-day success, a provincial affair, and to be forgotten as such. | |
But the innate power of a work can never be concealed or closed off in the long run. A work of art can be forgotten by time, it can be forbidden and become stale, but the elemental always forces its way to victory over the ephemeral. One month, two months nothing is heard of the war song of the Rhine army. The printed and handwritten copies lie and wander around in indifferent hands. But it is always enough if a work really inspires even a single person, for every genuine enthusiasm itself becomes creative. At the other end of France, in Marseille, the Club of the Friends of the Constitution held a banquet for the marching volunteers on June 22. Five hundred young, fiery people in their new uniforms of the National Guard were seated at a long table; in their circle exactly the same mood as on April 25 in Strasbourg, only even hotter, more heated and more passionate, thanks to the southern temperament of the people of Marseilles, and no longer so vainly confident of victory as in that first hour of the declaration of war. For not, as those generals fibbed, have the revolutionary French troops marched straight across the Rhine and been welcomed everywhere with open arms. On the contrary, the enemy has advanced deep into the French countryside, freedom is threatened, the cause of liberty is in danger. | |
Suddenly, in the midst of the feast, one - his name is Mireur and he is a medical student from the University of Montpellier - strikes his glass and rises. Everyone falls silent and looks at him. One expects a speech and an address. But instead, the young man swings up his right hand and intones a song, a new song that they all don't know and no one knows how it got into his hand, "Allons, enfants de la patrie." And now the spark ignites as if it had fallen into a powder keg. Feeling and emotion, the eternal poles, have touched. All these young people who are going out tomorrow, who want to fight for freedom and are ready to die for the fatherland, feel their innermost will, their very own thoughts expressed in these words; irresistibly the rhythm sweeps them up into a unanimous, ecstatic enthusiasm. Verse after verse is cheered, once again, a second time the song must be repeated, and already the melody has become their own, already they sing, excitedly jumping up, glasses raised, the refrain thundering along. "Aux armes, citoyens! Formez vos bataillons!" Curious people crowd in from the street to hear what is being sung here with such enthusiasm, and already they are singing along themselves; the next day the melody is on a thousand and ten thousand lips. A reprint spreads it, and as the five hundred volunteers march off on July 2, the song travels with them. When they get tired on the road, when their step becomes slack, only one person needs to sing the hymn, and its rousing, its forward-rushing beat gives them all renewed momentum. When they march through a village and the peasants gather in amazement, the inhabitants curious, they sing it in chorus. It has become their song, they have, without knowing that it was intended for the Rhine Army, without suspecting by whom and when it was composed, adopted the hymn as that of their battalion, as a confession of their life and death. It belongs to them like the flag, and in passionate advance they want to carry it over the world. | |
The first great victory of the Marseillaise - for that is what Rouget's anthem will soon call itself - is Paris. On June 30, the battalion marches in through the faubourgs, flag in front and song. Thousands and tens of thousands stand and wait in the streets to receive them festively, and as the Marseillers now approach, five hundred men, singing as it were from one throat to the beat of the song and singing it again and again, the crowd listens. What is this magnificent, ravishing hymn that the people of Marseilles are singing? What a fanfare this, driving into all hearts, accompanied by the pattering drumbeat, this "Aux armes, citoyens!" Two hours later, three hours later, and already the refrain resounds in all alleys again. Forgotten is the "Ça ira," forgotten the old marches, the worn-out couplets: the revolution has recognized its own voice, the revolution has found its song. | |
The spread of the hymn became avalanche-like, the triumphant run unstoppable. The hymn is sung at banquets, in theaters and clubs, then even in churches after the Tedeum and soon instead of the Tedeum. In one, in two months the Marseillaise has become the song of the people and of the whole army. Servan, the first republican minister of war, recognizes with a wise eye the tonic, the exalting power of such a unique national battle song. In hasty order he commands that a hundred thousand copies be sent to all commands, and in two or three nights the Song of the Unknown is more widespread than all the works of Molière, Racine, and Voltaire. No feast that does not close with the Marseillaise, no battle where regimental musicians do not for the time being intone the war song of freedom. At Jemappes and Nerwinden, the regiments arrange themselves in choral song for the decisive storm, and the enemy generals, who can only stimulate their soldiers with the old recipe of doubled brandy rations, see with fright that they have nothing to oppose the explosive force of this "terrible" hymn when, sung simultaneously by thousands and thousands, it rushes against their own ranks like a ringing, clashing wave. Over all the battles of France now floats, sweeping countless into enthusiasm and death, the Marseillaise, like Nike, the winged goddess of victory. | |
Meanwhile, in the small garrison of Hüningen, a most unknown captain of fortifications, Rouget, sits dutifully designing ramparts and entrenchments. Perhaps he has already forgotten the "War Song of the Rhine Army" that he created on that lost night of April 26, 1792, and does not even dare to suspect, when he reads in the gazettes about that other hymn, that other war song that takes Paris by storm, that this victorious "Song of the Marseilles" is word for word and measure for measure nothing other than the miracle of that night that happened in him and to him. For cruel irony of fate - rushing to all heavens, roaring to the stars, this melody does not carry high only one person, namely the person who devised it. Nobody in all France cares about Captain Rouget de Lisle, the most enormous fame ever known to a song remains to the song, and not a shadow of it falls on its creator Rouget. His name is not printed on the texts, and he himself would remain completely unnoticed by the masters of the hour, if he did not bring himself into annoying memory. For - ingenious paradox as only history can invent it - the creator of the revolutionary hymn is not a revolutionary; on the contrary: he who, like no other, drove the revolution on through his immortal song, now wants to curb it back with all his might. When the people of Marseilles and the Parisian mob - his song on their lips - storm the Tuileries and the king is deposed, Rouget de Lisle has had enough of the revolution. He refuses to take the oath of allegiance to the Republic and resigns rather than serve the Jacobins. The word of "liberté chérie", the beloved liberty, in his hymn is not an empty word to this upright man: he detests the new tyrants and despots in the Convention no less than he hated those crowned and anointed beyond the borders. He openly gives vent to his displeasure against the Welfare Committee when his friend, Mayor Dietrich, the godfather of the Marseillaise, when General Luckner, to whom it was dedicated, when all the officers and nobles who were their first listeners that evening are dragged to the guillotine, and soon the grotesque situation occurs that the poet of the Revolution is imprisoned as a counter-revolutionary, that he, and he of all people, is put on trial with the accusation of having betrayed his fatherland. Only the 9th Thermidor, which opened the prisons with the fall of Robespierre, spared the French Revolution the ignominy of having handed over the poet of its most immortal song to the "national razor". | |
At least, it would have been a heroic death and not such a miserable twilight in the darkness as Rouget is imposed. For by more than forty years, by thousands and thousands of days, the unfortunate Rouget survives the only truly creative day of his life. His uniform has been taken off, his pension has been cancelled; the poems, the operas, the texts he writes are not printed, not performed. The fate does not forgive the dilettante for having entered the ranks of the immortals without being called. With all kinds of small and not always clean business the little man ekes out his small life. In vain, Carnot and later Bonaparte try to help him out of pity. But something in Rouget's character has become irredeemably poisoned and twisted by the cruelty of that coincidence which let him be God and genius for three hours and then contemptuously threw him back into his own nothingness. He quarrels and crosses with all powers, he writes insolent and pathetic letters to Bonaparte, who wanted to help him, he boasts publicly that he voted against him in the referendum. His business entangles him in dark affairs, and because of an unpaid bill of exchange he even has to make acquaintance with the debtors' prison St. Pelargie. Unpopular in all places, hounded by debtors, constantly spied on by the police, he finally holes up somewhere in the provinces, and as if from a grave, secluded and forgotten, he listens from there to the fate of his immortal song; he still experiences that the Marseillaise storms with the victorious armies over all the countries of Europe, then still that Napoleon, hardly emperor, has it deleted from all programs as too revolutionary, that the Bourbons then ban it completely. The embittered old man is only amazed when, after an age, the July Revolution of 1830 resurrects his words and his melody in their old strength at the barricades of Paris, and the bourgeois king Louis Philippe grants him a small pensium as a poet. It seems like a dream to the lost, the forgotten, that he is remembered at all, but it is only a small remembrance, and when the seventy-six-year-old finally dies in Choisy-le-Roi in 1836, no one calls or knows his name anymore. Once again, an age must pass: Only in the World War, when the Marseillaise, which had long since become the national anthem, resounds again in war on all fronts of France, is it ordered that the body of the little Captain Rouget be buried in the same place in the Invalides Cathedral as that of the little Lieutenant Bonaparte, and so at last the most unfamous creator of an eternal song rests in the crypt of glory of his fatherland from the disappointment of having been nothing but the poet of a single night. | |