Background
Claude Joseph Rouge De Lisle was born on May 18, 1760 at Lons-le-Saunier, France.
Claude Joseph Rouge De Lisle was born on May 18, 1760 at Lons-le-Saunier, France.
He attended the school for army engineers at Mézières and rose to the rank of major in 1796, but in the same year he resigned his commission.
He was one of those authors whom a single work has made famous.
The song which has immortalized him, the Marseillaise, was composed at Strassburg, where Rouget de Lisle was quartered in April 1792.
He wrote both words and music in a fit of patriotic excitement after a public dinner.
The author was a moderate republican, and was cashiered and thrown into prison; but the counter-revolution set him at liberty.
The stirring melody of the Marseillaise and its ingenious adaptation to the words serve to disguise the alternate poverty and bombast of the words themselves.
Rouget de Lisle wrote a few other songs of the same kind, and in 1825 he published Chants franqais, in which he set to music fifty songs by various authors.
His Essais en vers et en prose (1797) contains the Marseillaise, a prose tale of the sentimental kind called Adelaide et Monville, and some occasional poems.
