Send him victorious, happy and glorious

From France’s rousing, fiercely Republican La Marseillaise to Switzerland’s bucolic ‘Psalm’ and the proud, stately God Save the King, national anthems are a rallying cry for us all, says Charles Harris

- Charles Harris

MUSIC is powerful, for it can beguile, annoy or inspire. One sentiment it readily inspires is patriotism—pride and love for one’s country. Thus, the world has followed Britain in adopting national anthems —a musical coat of arms, trademark or aural flag—for use on state occasions, sporting competition or in war. God Save the King will be the musical cynosure of Charles III’s coronation.

Such anthems were rare outside England when, in April 1792, Claude-Joseph Rouget de Lisle, 31, a French army captain, heard the mayor of Strasbourg lament the lack of a good revolutionary song. De Lisle, a man of action, overnight wrote words and music for a ‘chant de guerre’ for the army of the Rhine. An instant success (which saved him from the guillotine), it was christened La Marseillaise when adopted by Provençal irregulars marching to storm the Tuileries. It is a ferocious call to war. ‘Aux armes, citoyens… let the impure blood of our enemies water the furrows of our land.’ Although not perhaps what might be expected from a country of quiet cafés and ubiquitous romance, it is the epitome of a rousing national anthem—ideal preliminary to a rugby match or bayonet charge. Napoleon Bonaparte banned it as unsuitably Republican.

Countries emerging from dismantled empires in the 19th and 20th centuries acquired anthems almost as national birth certificates. Now more than 200, they vary remarkably in style and merit, often favouring what Fanny Burney called ‘the delusive seduction of martial music’. Fatherlands, motherlands and homelands without gender utilise opera- tic marches, hymns, odes to natural beauty or melodic history lessons. Moving or turgid, ecstatic or sanguinary, some confirm, others contradict, their nation’s character.