La Marseillaise: Lyrics, Meaning & History Explained

Every four years a stadium full of people belts out a line about impure blood watering the furrows of French farmland, and most of the world sings along without ever checking what it says. La Marseillaise is one of the most recognizable national anthems on earth, and it is also, line for line, one of the bloodiest pieces of text any country has ever set to music. Once you can actually read the French, it stops being a stirring tune and becomes exactly what it was written as: a war song.

Closing that gap is worth doing, and not only for the history. The French national anthem is an unusually generous text for a learner: in four opening lines and a four-line refrain it hands you three imperatives, a subjunctive, and a pile of vocabulary that still turns up in French newspapers. It is also short — almost nobody sings past the first verse, so the whole thing fits on one screen, and you have very likely heard the melody enough times to hum it already.

Who Wrote It, and Why It Is Not Named After Its Author

France declared war on Austria in April 1792, and in Strasbourg the mayor asked an army engineer named Claude Joseph Rouget de Lisle for a marching song for the troops. He wrote it in a single night. Its original title was not La Marseillaise at all but Chant de guerre pour l'Armée du Rhin (War Song for the Army of the Rhine), and Rouget de Lisle himself was a moderate royalist who was later imprisoned during the Terror — a genuinely awkward fact for a song that became the sound of the Revolution.

The name it ended up with came from the singers, not the writer. In the summer of 1792, volunteer soldiers from Marseille marched north to Paris singing it the whole way, and Parisians named the tune after the men who brought it. It was adopted as the national anthem in 1795, banned under Napoleon and again during the Bourbon Restoration, and made permanent in 1879 under the Third Republic.

Key Phrases

• l'hymne national (leemn nah-syoh-nal) — the national anthem
• un chant de guerre (uhn shahn duh gair) — a war song
• la Révolution française (lah ray-vo-lu-syohn frahn-sez) — the French Revolution
• un couplet (uhn koo-pleh) — a verse
• le refrain (luh ruh-fran) — the chorus

[AUDIO: la Marseillaise]

The Opening Lines, Translated

Four lines, and every one of them is doing something a learner can use.

Allons enfants de la Patrie (ah-lohn zahn-fahn duh lah pah-tree) — Let's go, children of the Homeland. Le jour de gloire est arrivé (luh zhoor duh glwahr eh tah-ree-vay) — The day of glory has arrived. Contre nous de la tyrannie (kohn-truh noo duh lah tee-rah-nee) — Against us, tyranny's. L'étendard sanglant est levé (lay-tahn-dar sahn-glahn eh luh-vay) — bloody banner is raised.

Those last two lines are one sentence with the word order shuffled for the rhyme, which is why they look broken read separately. Straightened out: l'étendard sanglant de la tyrannie est levé contre nous — tyranny's bloody banner is raised against us. Reordering like this is common in older French verse, and spotting it is half the battle.

Key Phrases

• la patrie (lah pah-tree) — the homeland, the fatherland
• la gloire (lah glwahr) — glory
• un étendard (uhn ay-tahn-dar) — a banner, a standard
• sanglant (sahn-glahn) — bloody
• la tyrannie (lah tee-rah-nee) — tyranny

The Refrain Everyone Knows

Aux armes, citoyens ! Formez vos bataillons ! Marchons, marchons ! Qu'un sang impur abreuve nos sillons ! — To arms, citizens! Form your battalions! Let's march, let's march! May impure blood water our furrows!

That final line is the one that startles people, and it should: un sillon is the groove a plough cuts in a field, and the image is enemy blood soaking into French farmland. It is not a metaphor that has softened with age.

Grammar Note

The refrain is built almost entirely out of imperatives — commands — and it shows off both forms at once. The vous imperative is just the present-tense vous form with the pronoun dropped: vous formez becomes Formez ! The nous imperative works the same way and translates as English "let's": nous marchons becomes Marchons !

• allons — let's go (from aller)
• marchons — let's march (from marcher)
• formez — form (from former, addressing vous)
• Common mistake: leaving the pronoun in, as in nous marchons when you mean Marchons ! An imperative never carries its subject pronoun.

The line Qu'un sang impur abreuve nos sillons is a different structure worth noticing: a que clause with the verb in the subjunctive, used to express a wish about something outside the speaker's control. You will meet the same pattern in far gentler company — Qu'il vienne ! (Let him come!) or Que Dieu vous garde (May God keep you).

The lyrics have been argued about in France for well over a century. Prominent voices have periodically proposed rewriting the bloodier lines, and no proposal has ever come close to succeeding — the general view is that the anthem is a historical document of 1792, not a description of anything anyone wants today. Whistling or booing during the anthem at an official event has been treated as an offence in French law since 2003, which tells you how seriously it is still taken.

Where You Will Actually Hear It

On 14 July — le quatorze juillet, Bastille Day — and at every international football and rugby match France plays, which is where most non-French people meet it. It also anchors one of cinema's great scenes: in Casablanca, the patrons of Rick's café drown out a German song by singing it, and the emotion on the extras' faces was not entirely acted, since many of them were real refugees from occupied France.

The full text runs to seven verses, plus a later couplet des enfants (children's verse) that Rouget de Lisle did not write. In practice you will only ever hear the first verse and the refrain — roughly forty seconds of French, and all you need to sing along.

Putting It to Use

Pull up a recording and try singing the first verse and refrain with the words in front of you. Two pronunciation points make an outsized difference. First, the liaison in Allons enfants: the normally silent s of allons links onto the vowel that follows and comes out as a z, giving you ah-lohn-zahn-fahn as one connected phrase, not two separate words. Second, the nasal vowels do a lot of work here — enfants, sanglant, bataillons, sillons all end in nasals, and letting the n become its own hard consonant is the fastest way to sound like you are reading rather than singing.

Practice Exercises

• Translate: Le jour de gloire est arrivé.
• What is the nous imperative of marcher, and what does it mean in English?
• Fill in the blank with the vous imperative of former: ___ vos bataillons !
• True or false: the song was originally written about, and named for, the city of Marseille.
• What mood is the verb abreuve in, in the line Qu'un sang impur abreuve nos sillons ?
• Translate: un chant de guerre.

Answer Key

• The day of glory has arrived.
• Marchons — "let's march."
• Formez vos bataillons !
• False. It was written in Strasbourg as Chant de guerre pour l'Armée du Rhin, and took its name from the volunteers from Marseille who sang it into Paris.
• The subjunctive, in a que clause expressing a wish.
• A war song.

Forty Seconds of 1792

• La Marseillaise was written overnight in Strasbourg in 1792 as an army marching song, and got its name from the soldiers who carried it to Paris, not from its author.
• Its refrain is a compact lesson in the French imperative: Marchons ! for "let's march" (nous form) and Formez ! for "form" (vous form), both with the subject pronoun dropped.
• The line about impure blood is exactly as violent as it sounds, and France has debated it for a century without ever changing it.

Next time the anthem plays before a match, you will know what the stadium is actually singing. Head to Passage's Grammar section for the full rules on the imperative mood these lines are built from, or try a round of Exercises to drill the nous and vous command forms.