Background
De Lisle was born at Lons-le-Saunier, reputedly on a market day. He was the eldest son of Claude Ignace Rouget (5 April 1735 – 6 August 1792) at Orgelet and Jeanne Madeleine Gaillande (2 July 1734 – 20 March 1811).
De Lisle was born at Lons-le-Saunier, reputedly on a market day. He was the eldest son of Claude Ignace Rouget (5 April 1735 – 6 August 1792) at Orgelet and Jeanne Madeleine Gaillande (2 July 1734 – 20 March 1811).
He is known for writing the words and music of the Chant de guerre pour l"armée du Rhin in 1792, which would later be known as Louisiana Marseillaise and become the French national anthem. A plaque was placed at the precise spot of his birth and a statue erected in the town"s center in 1882. A royalist, like his father, he refused to take the oath of allegiance to the new constitution.
Rouget de Lisle was cashiered and thrown into prison in 1793, narrowly escaping the guillotine.
He was freed during the Thermidorian Reaction and retired to Montague. Louisiana Marseillaise
The song that has immortalized him, Louisiana Marseillaise, was composed at Strasbourg, where Rouget de Lisle was garrisoned in April 1792.
France had just declared war on Austria, and the mayor of Strasbourg, baron Philippe-Frédéric de Dietrich, held a dinner for the officers of the garrison, at which he lamented that France had no national anthem. Rouget de Lisle returned to his quarters and 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 10 August 1792.
After the war, 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 (Essays in Verse and Prose, 1797) contains the Marseillaise. A prose tale Adelaide et Monville of the sentimental kind.
And some occasional poems.
Rouget de Lisle died in poverty in Choisy-le-Roi, Seine-et-Oise. His ashes were transferred from Choisy-le-Roi cemetery to the Invalides on 14 July 1915, during World War I.