Claude Joseph Rouget de Lisle

Claude Joseph Rouget de Lisle wrote the Marseillaise in a night and nearly went to the guillotine. Born at Lons-le-Saunier in the Jura in 1760 to a lawyer, he trained as a military engineer at Mézières and was posted to the garrison at Strasbourg, where he wrote verse and songs as an amateur. France declared war on Austria on 20 April 1792. The mayor of Strasbourg, Philippe-Frédéric de Dietrich, remarked at dinner that the troops needed a marching song better than the ones they had, and asked Rouget de Lisle to write one. He produced it that night, on 25 or 26 April, words and music together, and called it the war song for the Army of the Rhine. It travelled south, was printed, and was taken up by a battalion of volunteers from Marseille who sang it marching into Paris that summer — which is how it acquired the name it kept. It was declared the national anthem in July 1795. He was a constitutional monarchist rather than a republican. He refused to swear an oath against the king, was dismissed from the army and imprisoned during the Terror, and was released after Thermidor, which he survived by weeks. He fought and was wounded in the Vendée, was discharged in 1796, and spent the rest of his life in obscurity and poverty, writing songs that nobody wanted and being imprisoned for debt. Napoleon and then the restored Bourbons both suppressed the anthem; it was restored permanently in 1879. Louis-Philippe granted him a small pension. He died in 1836.

• Lived: 1760 CE – 1836 CE
• Nationality: French
• Roles: composer, poet