Marseillaise
2 of the 6 encyclopedias on this shelf carry an entry for Marseillaise. Both are reproduced below, so you can see where they agree and where they differ.
Aiton's Encyclopedia (1910)
mar-sa-yaz', the song of the French Revolution . In 1792, when a column of volunteers was about to march from Strasburg, the mayor of the city gave a banquet in their honor. He asked an officer of artillery, Rouget de Lisle, to compose a song for the occasion. The young man, being fired with enthusiasm for the Revolutionary cause, composed both song and music in a single night. He called it the war song of the army of the Rhine. It was a complete success. It was sung at the banquet with such enthusiasm that the column of 600 men was swelled by volunteers to 1,000 on the spot. The army of the north and eastern France took up the song. The Parisians heard it for the first time when an enthusiastic column of Marseilles youth reached the city. The populace went wild over the song and, ignorant of its real authorship, called it the Marseillaise. It is the national anthem of France. Forward, forward, countrymen! The glorious day has come!
Collier's New Encyclopedia (1921)
a song written by Rouget de Lisle, an officer of artillery in the garrison of Strasbourg in 1792. It received its title from having been sung by a party of the Marseillaise Club as they entered Paris on the invitation of Madame Roland; the song, though less sanguinary in sentiment than most of the songs of the Revolution, was employed as accompaniment to many of the horrible deeds of that and of later periods, and by association became dangerous enough to be included among the songs prohibited to be sung in France under the Bourbons and the Bonapartes. It has become the national air of France, and during the World War was sung and played universally in the Allied countries, and in the United States.
What Has Changed in the Last Century
Both accounts have the essentials right: Rouget de Lisle wrote the "war song of the army of the Rhine" at Strasbourg in April 1792, and the fédérés from Marseille who sang it into Paris that summer gave it the name it kept. Its status has only hardened since Collier's wrote in 1921 that it "has become the national air of France": having been formally readopted by the Third Republic in 1879, it is now named as the national anthem in Article 2 of the 1958 constitution, alongside the tricolour and "Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité." What the old entries could not foresee is a century of argument over the words rather than the tune — the line about impure blood watering the furrows has drawn repeated calls for revision — and over performance, from Serge Gainsbourg's 1979 reggae version, which provoked bomb threats and a paratroopers' protest, to Giscard d'Estaing's decision to slow the official tempo in the 1970s, later reversed. Collier's note that it was "sung and played universally in the Allied countries" during the World War prefigures its later career as a general anthem of defiance, most famously in the 1942 film Casablanca.
Written for this edition, 2026.