Each year, my wife and I and a group of our friends celebrate, on or near the correct date, Bastille Day. We put a monster Tricolor, assembled from colored sheets of corrugated-core flat plastic, in the back yard, play Edith Piaf, watch parts of French movies and movies about things variously French ...
... and, of course, around dessert time, belt out what I think of as Western culture's most inspiring national song -- the Marseillaise.
We often warm up for this by playing the scene in "Casablanca" in which Rick's Café Américain resounds to the defiant French overcoming the German officers' song with "La Marseillaise." Or we may revisit the scene near the end of "Is Paris Burning?" in which the great bell of Notre Dame, silent through the Occupation, is once again rung to celebrate the capital's liberation. Or even the singing of the Brazilian and French national songs before France's triumph in the 1998 World Cup final, two days before Bastille Day, in the Stade de France.
There are several national songs with great and inspiring music -- although sometimes the words should be discreetly ignored. Opinions on which these are will of course differ, but among those I have heard I count the German one, footnote1 both the Czarist and the contemporary (now reworded, but with the music from Soviet days) Russian ones, footnote2 the American "Star-Spangled Banner," and the Norwegian one. footnote3
But above all these, I am stirred by "La Marseillaise." It is music to attend and elevate any great effort in a good cause. If I contemplate American paratroopers crossing the French coast in the night before D-Day, for example, I hear it in my imagination. I have played it in my mind before many lesser occasions on which I needed to do my very best.
Le jour de gloire est arrivé! Contre nous de la tyrannie L'étandard sanglant est levé, L'étandard sanglant est levé! Entendez-vous dans nos campagnes Mugir ces féroces soldats? Ils viennent jusque dans nos bras Égorger vos fils, vos compagnes. Aux armes, citoyens! Formez vos bataillons! Marchons, marchons! Qu'un sang impur Abreuve nos sillons!
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The day of glory is here! Against us the bloodstained banner of tyranny is raised [replaces two lines of French], The bloodstained banner is raised! Do you hear, in our fields, These ferocious soldiers howling? They come right into our arms, Cutting the throats of your sons, your companions. To arms, citizens! Form your battalions! Let us march, let us march! So that an impure blood May water our fields [even more literally, give drink to our furrows]!
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I once had a letter published in TIME magazine, on an occasion when there was a move in France to update the Marseillaise by making its imagery less bloody, in fact to bowdlerize it. I opposed such a move and recalled how well the song had suited my thoughts and emotions during what I call the August Revolution, the attempted coup in Russia in August, 1991. Then, Muscovite citizens indeed needed to arm themselves and form into battalions, raising their own white, blue and red tricolor against the blood-red banner of Soviet tyranny while the tank engines howled in their streets (fortunately, courage and the good sense of the soldiery sufficed, and the bloodshed was extraordinarily minimal).
But in spite of these antirevisionist sentiments, I have to admit that my love of the song didn't get in the way earlier, when I felt inspired to try writing other words myself to set to the music.
The occasion was the French Bicentennial in 1989. The Arts and Entertainment network carried a five-hour show of the celebrations, which climaxed in Jessye Norman's majestic performance of the song, in slow tempo, literally wrapped in the flag, in the open air in the Place de la Concorde.
But this was only a few weeks after the events in Tiananmen Square, and the big bicentennial parade paid marked tribute to the students' heroism.
I responded to this juxtaposition with the following:
(I dithered over replacing the last line with "Of gerontocracy," but decided this time to go with emotion rather than accuracy.)
Footnotes:
1
Yes, it's the same tune as "Deutschland Über Alles,"
but the Germans changed the words in 1952 to use instead
just the third verse of the original poem, translated to:
(which pretty much scans)
Unity and Right and Freedom
Click
here
to return to the text that referred to this footnote.
For the German Fatherland!
After these let us all strive
Brotherly with heart and hand!
Unity and Right and Freedom
Are the pledge of happiness.
Bloom in the splendour of this happiness,
Bloom, my German Fatherland!
2
The Czarist one was, as might be guessed,
"God save the Czar."
It can be heard to good effect, juxtaposed with
"La Marseillaise," in Tchaikovsky's "1812 Overture."
The contemporary one returns, after an interlude
using what I and apparently many Russians thought of
as an inferior newer tune, to the rousing music of
the Soviet Union song, but without the old "Unbreakable
Union of Soviet Republics ... " words.
Since January 1, 2001, a non-scanning and occasionally
baffling translation is:
From the South seas to the polar edge
Wide open spaces for the dream and the life
(well, read it charitably and trust that the Russian
is as rousing as before)
Russia - our sacred power,
Click
here
to return to the text that referred to this footnote.
Russia - our dear country.
Powerful will, great glory -
Your virtue to all periods!
Sing to the fatherland, o free!
Fraternal peoples the union of age-long,
By ancestors this wisdom is people!
Our glorious land! We are proud of you!
Our forests and fields were stretched.
One you in the light! One you such -
Native land, stored by God!
The future to us opens years.
Our faithfulness to the fatherland gives force to us.
So it was, so there is and so it will be always!
3
If they hadn't adopted "Advance Australia Fair,"
I'd surely include Australia for "Waltzing Matilda,"
which was their unofficial national song
(versus the official "God Save the Queen") before.
I understand some Australians would like to have
"Matilda" for the official song.
More power to them.
One song which would definitely be high
on my list, on a par with "La Marseillaise" really,
is that of the European Union, which isn't yet a nation,
but may well, with luck, be one in years to come.
It's Beethoven's "Ode to Joy."
I lived with that tune for those marvellous weeks in 1989
beginning with the fall of the Berlin Wall and ending
with the self-liberation of Romania.
The European Union plays it on official occasions.
Without words.
Click
here
to return to the text that referred to this footnote.
4
My birth country of the United Kingdom, the United
States, my present country of Canada, and of course
France, respectively.
But even the beautiful Norwegian song,
"Yes, we love this country,"
which poetically praises the nation's
beauty and "the saga of past ages, that
sends dreams to our earth" in the first
verse,
switches in the second verse to the need
for divine protection when
"things looked dark ... while fathers fought
and mothers cried".
Feelings of security seem to be largely fleeting in
national songs.
Click
here
to return to the text that referred to this footnote.
Acknowledgement: for pointers to the texts in
these footnotes, and for his accumulation of
research, I want to acknowledge the work of
David Kendall, who used to have a page
attached to national-anthems.net;
currently (2007), however, national-anthems.net (click
here),
which is now reached from and "watermarked" with
a domain belonging to
Go Daddy Software Inc.,
and which has extensive information on anthems and
related subjects, no longer has his page attached.
I don't know the extent to which their information
is still based on his work.
Return to "Writings" page
to make another selection.
© 2007 Anthony Buckland,
anthonybuckland@telus.net
last modified: May 12, 2007
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