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FAMOUS SONGS |
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CHAPTER IV
" L A MARSEILLAISE"
THE wild, pulse-stirring, revolutionary song " Le Chant des Marseillaise"—it was called "patriotic" in the last decade of the last century—which has had so much effect on political and social life in more countries than France, was originally written by Claude Joseph Rouget de Lisle in the winter of 1792. I say " originally," because many versions appeared almost immediately after its production, so popu-lar did it become with the soldiers and peasants alike, when several hundred sturdy revolution-ists from Marseilles marched into Paris to its strains. The Parisians took it up immediately, and the Austrian and Prussian regulars were beaten again and again by the ragged sans-culottes to this tune, as every reader of Carlyle's "History of the French Revolution" knows. Curiously enough, the "Marseillaise" is still the official patriotic hymn in France under the present most Philistine of Republics! And we, on this side of the Channel, duly recognized
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