Republic or Death! (5 page)

Rouget could have simply done a good job and gradually re-established his reputation. Unfortunately, he was a letter writer, the sort of person who thinks nothing of sending a ten-page missive to his boss every time he has a problem, and spends the first nine of those failing to get to the point. Worse, he was a letter writer who didn't get disheartened, a man who believed that truth and honesty would always win out. So when Napoleon didn't write back to his first rant, Rouget simply sent him another letter, and another, and another, getting more wound up with each line.

The letters all started because some Frenchmen stole a Dutch ship along with several million francs' worth of cargo. The Dutch were unable to get their money back, even after going to the courts. A travesty, Rouget thought; the ultimate insult to these brave allies of France. How could Napoleon think he'd keep the loyalty of that country and its 200,000 soldiers if he couldn't even keep their ships safe? So Rouget wrote Napoleon a letter on their behalf, pleading for justice. And that letter led to lots and lots more. And after a few, they stopped saying anything about the Dutch and just became personal.

‘Bonaparte,' he writes in one, ‘you've lost yourself, and what's worse, you've lost France with you … Whatever your plan, you've misplaced it, whatever your projects they've become a catastrophe.' In another he simply says: ‘Are you happy? I can't believe it.' Some of the letters are devastating assassinations of life in Napoleonic France. ‘The national spirit is nothing but fake enthusiasm,' he writes. ‘The national interest has become the interests of one family, the national glory nothing but the foul sewer of sycophancy.' He takes apart priests, generals, judges and officials. They're all liars and thieves, bringers of ‘the stupid tyranny under which we're graced'. He occasionally gives Napoleon credit, says he'll be able to turn things around, and pretends he didn't mean anything he'd just said. But those platitudes are tossed in at the end: a few words that clearly aren't going to stop the flames started by the thousands before. It takes some guts – or a spectacular lack of judgement – to write letters like that.

Napoleon, unsurprisingly, didn't take well to any of these missives and he did what anyone would: he disowned ‘La Marseillaise', suspending the decree that had made it the anthem in 1795, letting his hatred of it be well known and calling for other songs to be played in his presence instead. The song wouldn't inspire a revolution against
him
and neither would the man who wrote it. By the early 1800s – just a decade after writing the song – Rouget was penniless in Paris and being spied on by the police.

You can pass over the rest of Rouget's life pretty quickly. He kept on trying to carve out a stable career as a songwriter – he wrote over 200 songs and a number of musical plays. Unfortunately none of them were any good. Whatever perfect alignment of inspiration and ability Rouget had enjoyed on that one night seemed to have left him. The musicals were the sort that got closed down after opening night; the songs the sort that couldn't even please a drunk. Rouget was forced to move back to his parents' house. He was then forced to sell it. He was imprisoned for debts. He took up debt collecting. He eventually tried to commit suicide, but failed at that too.

At one point he even went into porn. A few weeks before going to Marseilles, I visited Lons-le-Saunier and was taken around Rouget's childhood home by the town's dapper head of tourism, Dominique Brunet. The flat is now a museum and in a display case I spotted a document, a song manuscript. I could tell it wasn't ‘La Marseillaise', but I couldn't make out the words properly, especially as half of them were hidden behind card. I asked Dominique what it was about. He ummed and aahed and looked embarrassed before turning to an assistant, who giggled.

‘Do you have to know?' he asked, pained. ‘It's about this girl, Rosette. She's beautiful, and she's bathing in a river. Then a man comes along. And … well … you know … they start having sex. Shall we move on?'

While Rouget was trying his hand at smut, Napoleon was at war with most of Europe, trying to spread France's values of liberty and freedom (the freedom to be ruled by Napoleon). But he began to suffer serious defeats in Russia and Germany. Millions died and his power started to wane. As the defeats mounted, he became so desperate he even started tolerating the singing of ‘La Marseillaise' again, hoping it, if nothing else, would bring his troops strength. It didn't help: in 1814 he was forced to abdicate and was exiled to a small island off the Italian coast. France reverted to monarchy and the new king, Louis XVIII, banned ‘La Marseillaise' completely. You can't have an anti-monarchy song sung in a kingdom, after all, and it had provided the soundtrack for the overthrow of his brother. He chose a tune called ‘La Parisienne' as France's anthem instead, a song so stuffy you feel you need to be wearing a powdered wig to sing it.

Rouget did write a song to the new monarch, trying to get in his good books. ‘Long live the king [is] the noble cry of old France,' it started. But Louis XVIII treated it with the contempt such desperation probably deserved.

*

Rouget died in 1836, while living in a countess's house in the Parisian suburb of Choisy-le-Roi. Old army friends had found him the room, and he spent his final years there relatively happy, making fake ‘original' manuscripts of ‘La Marseillaise' to sell for drink money. He didn't even bother writing the original title of the song on them; they all simply said ‘La Marseillaise'.

People wanted Rouget's song, not him, and he knew it. Is that the fate of all anthem composers, to be irrelevant compared to their songs? In Rouget's case, I just don't think so. If his personality hadn't got in the way, he'd at least have been far more known in his day than he was, and so maybe now.

You can still see the house Rouget died in today. It's yellow and black, timber-framed, almost medieval in appearance, with a high wall hiding a garden full of 200-year-old yew trees. It's the last thing you expect to see in modern Paris surrounded by dirty tower blocks and dual carriageways. Rouget had the smallest room at the back and its tiny four-paned window would have barely let in any light, even if it wasn't choked with soot as it is now. Today, the building is just a few doors from the Society of Young French Buddhists, whose courtyard has a pagoda in it and is full of men in saffron robes. I doubt any of them are fans of a song as violent as ‘La Marseillaise'.

*

I gave up cycling. It happened four days in. That morning I set off from a town called Valence – 136 miles from Marseilles; only 364 miles from Paris. The day started well, with a pretty ride through vineyards where teams of workers were picking grapes, piling them into trucks, hundreds of boxes at a time, so much juice squeezing out of the grapes at the bottom it made me want to stop and find a glass.

But then I hit another hill. A big hill at that. And worse, one with that bloody mistral wind blowing straight down it and into me. The road had large stones at the side to mark each kilometre of the climb. At marker one I got off my bike and pushed. I could feel a blister on my foot threatening to pop with every step. I could hear my knees creaking – and when you're thirty-one, hearing your knees creak is a worrying sign. In an effort to get some energy I ate a preserved sausage I'd bought back in Aix-en-Provence but it was stuffed with olives and the salt just made me thirsty. I put on some music – dance tunes to trick me into thinking I was in an aerobics class and force me up the hill – but one of my headphones had stopped working and being deafened in one ear was hardly what I needed.

It was around that point I realised I had no other option but to take inspiration from the 517 marchers and try singing ‘La Marseillaise'. I'd been studying it; I knew all the words now. Ask for any line and I'd give it back to you probably quicker than the French president. Give me the fifth and sixth! ‘
Entendez-vous dans les campagnes
/
MUUUU-GIR ces féroces soldats?
' The third in the chorus! ‘
Marchons! March-ONS!
' If there was ever a time to test the power of this song, it was now.

And so I got on my bike, stood up to pedal the first few metres to build up speed, then straightened my back, pushed out my chest and lifted my head high to sing. I wanted every one of those triumphant words echoing down the valley behind me. ‘
Allons enfants de la PATRI-E
,' I started no problem. ‘Arise, children of the fatherland', it means. I punched out each syllable like a soldier. ‘
Le jour de gloire est arrivé!
' I went on just as strongly. The day of glory has arrived. My old choir teacher would be proud if he could see me now, I thought. But then I got on to the third line – ‘
Contre nous de la tyrannie
' – or, more to the point, one word into it, when I turned a corner, saw the road became twice as steep, felt the wind blasting my face with dust, and realised this wasn't for me. I just stumbled off. Pathetically. Miserably. I hadn't even reached the chorus.

My respect for the 517 Marseillais men grew in that moment. They just kept going for twenty-eight days regardless of the weather. They were willing to march all the way across France for as vague a mission as ‘striking down a tyrant'. That one song – just 302 words – drew qualities out of them I can't imagine.

Having said that, as I pulled out my map to find the nearest station, I did wonder what would have happened if they'd had trains back then. It was time to pack the cycling in and get a train to Lyon, I decided; to get back into an environment with concrete and skyscrapers and grime and dirt. The sort of place I'm used to. That decision turned out to be all the motivation I needed to get up the hill.

*

Throughout my time in France, I've been talking to people about ‘La Marseillaise', trying to work out what it really means for France today.

I met a man called Didier Cantarel who was working in a wine cellar. Compact and shaven-headed with a big smile, he comically sang the anthem while pouring me a glass of his best red ‘for tasting'. He then told me that he was a former soldier who'd served in Kosovo and Bosnia and had had to sing the anthem at too many people's funerals. It didn't mean he hated the song, though, and he insisted its violence has an admirable purpose. ‘It's often forgotten that it's a song of values – that it's about protecting liberty,' he said. ‘It's important to respect that; we can still learn from it. It is not like liberty has been achieved everywhere.'

I met an old woman in a bakery, who gave me a long lecture about how ‘La Marseillaise' is important because it reminds everyone that France once ruled Europe. ‘It gives us something to aim for,' she said, delicately picking a strawberry off a gateau (‘They get stuck in my teeth'). But then she told me the last thing she actually wanted was for France to become a world power again. ‘It'd be too much trouble,' she said. ‘Look at the problems the USA has, China has. I'm happy where we are. As long as we can speak our language, I don't mind what happens.'

I met girls who didn't even know the first line to the song, and men who asked to see a song sheet before attempting to sing it. I met a rock musician who told me he loved it but couldn't admit that to his friends. I even met a hippy who told me he'd happily march from Marseilles to Paris today just for the sense of community it'd bring. But the people I hadn't been able to get much out of were those I most wanted to: France's immigrants. The Algerians and Tunisians who'd moved to France after the Second World War. Their children. They make up a good 10 per cent of the population of the country and they're the people who've got most to dislike about ‘La Marseillaise' (especially the Algerians, given the eight years of war it took them to gain independence). They're also the ones who have provoked most discussion about it, having booed it at football games between France and Algeria, and between France and Tunisia.

I tried to get them to open up about it, talking to people in bars, in takeaways, in the street – even some kids break-dancing outside a theatre. They were all friendly people, but I got the most dismissive answers when I asked what they thought of ‘La Marseillaise'. ‘It's the national anthem,' they'd reply with a curt laugh. That was pretty much all they'd say, no matter how many follow-ups I tried. Although some would eventually become angry: ‘Why'd you ask me about this?'

That should explain why I couldn't have been more grateful when I got to Lyon and Lahouari Addi, one of the country's leading French-Algerian academics, agreed to talk.

It's 9 a.m. when he swings into the cafe where we've arranged to meet. Unshaven, a scarf tossed around his neck and waving ‘bonjour' to the staff, he looks every bit the French professor, not a hint of Algerian patriot about him. But almost as soon as he sits down he immediately starts speaking rapidly about ‘La Marseillaise' in the tones of a man who knows an injustice when he sees one, and who isn't even going to stop for pleasantries before railing against it. ‘French people who're not aware of colonial history don't see what is the problem,' he says. ‘For them, of course, “La Marseillaise” is a revolutionary anthem. It's almost sacred. Just like the US anthem is for Americans. But for most Algerians, “La Marseillaise” was something else. It was colonial domination. It's under the aegis of “La Marseillaise” that the French army tortured, killed, bombed villages.

‘I was in Algeria during the war – I was thirteen at independence – and I was aware that when we were hearing “La Marseillaise”, it was just like the French people hearing the Germans' Nazi anthem. Just like that. “La Marseillaise”, it has been soiled by colonial domination. That's why no one will talk to you about it, because they don't want to have to say there's a problem and harm their relationship with France.'