Historia Marsylianki (po ang.)
“La Marseillaise”
History
Following France’s declaration of war on Austria and Prussia, the mayor of Strasbourg, Baron de Dietrich, asked army engineer Claude-Joseph Rouget de Lisle to write a marching song. On the night of April 25th 1792, Rouget de Lisle penned the Chant de guerre pour l’armée du Rhin - war song for the Rhine Army, named in honour of the garrison to which he belonged.
The song was published under the name of Chant de guerre aux armées des frontières - Border armies’ war song by one François Mireur, who was in Marseille to organise a march of revolutionary volunteers on King Louis XVI’s Tuileries palace. The French Embassy in Fiji site describes Mireur as a student from Montpellier whereas the Prime Minister’s site casts him as a general of the Egyptian army recruiting volunteers from Montpellier and Marseille. I suspect this is more likely to be true.
Ironically, since Rouget de Lisle supported the monarchy, the revolutionaries adopted the song and sang it with such fervour as they entered the capital, on July 30th 1792, that the Parisians named it La Marseillaise.
It was declared a national song on July 14th 1795 but subsequently banned under the Empire. The July revolution of 1830 reinstated the song, which was rearranged by Hector Berlioz, and it was adopted as the national anthem under the Third Republic in 1879. In 1887 the Ministry of War, after consultation with a specially-appointed commission, adopted what it was to call an “official version” of the song, which was written into the Constitutions of the Fourth and Fifth Republics (1946 and 1958 respectively). Article 2 of the Constitution of October 4th 1958 designates La Marseillaise the national anthem of France.