ROUGET DE LISLEClaude Joseph (1760-1836), one of the most noteworthy of those authors whom a single short piece of work has made famous, was born on IOth May 1760, at Lons-le-Saunier. He entered the army as an engineer and attained the rank of captain. He wrote complimentary verses pretty early, and appears to have been a good musician. The song which has immortalized him, the Marseillaise, was composed at Strasburg, where Rouget de Lisle was quartered in April 1792, and he is said to have composed both the words and the music in a fit of patriotic excitement after a public dinner. The piece was at first called Ghant de Varmee du Rhin, 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. The author himself was unfavourably affected by that very event. He was a moderate republican, and was cashiered and thrown into prison; but the counterrevolution set him at liberty. Little is recorded of his later years, and he received no pension or other mark of favour till the accession of Louis Philippe. He died at Choisy on the 26th June 1836....
The Marseillaise (of which as usually given six-sevenths only are Rouget’s) is so well known that no elaborate criticism of it is necessary. The extraordinarily stirring character of the air and its ingenious adaptation to the words serve to disguise the alternate poverty and bombast of the words themselves. As poetry the sixth stanza alone has much merit. Rouget de Lisle λvrote a few other songs of the same kind, and set a good many of others’ writing to music. He also produced a play or two and some translations. But his chief literary monument is a slender and rather rare little volume entitled Essais en Vers et en Prose (Paris, 1796). This contains the Marseillaise, a prose tale of the sentimental kind called Adelaide et Monville, and a collection of occasional poems of various styles and dates, from which the author’s poetic faculty can be fairly judged. It is humble enough. Rouget was a mere follower of standard models, imitating by turns J. B. Rousseau, La Fontaine, and Voltaire, and exaggerating the artificial language of his time. In Toem et Lucy, which turns on a romantic story of the English army in America, he has contrived without in the least knowing it to make a pathetic subject supremely ludicrous. But he seems to have been a very well meaning and harmless person, and he had one moment of remarkable inspiration.
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