He enlisted into the army as an engineer and attained the rank of captain. A royalist like his father, he refused to take the oath of allegiance to the new constitution. Rouget de Lisle was cashiered and thrown into prison in 1793, narrowly escaping the guillotine. He was freed during the
Thermidorian Reaction and retired to Montaigu. was composed 11 years before by the Italian composer
Giovan Battista Viotti at the court of
Marie Antoinette. France had just declared war on Austria, and the mayor of Strasbourg and worshipful master of the local masonic lodge,
baron Philippe-Frédéric de Dietrich, held a dinner for the officers of the garrison, at which he lamented that France had no national anthem. Rouget de Lisle returned to his quarters and wrote the words in a fit of patriotic excitement. The piece was at first called ("War Song for the
Army of the Rhine") 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 Palace on
10 August 1792. After the war, Rouget de Lisle wrote a few other songs of the same kind as the "Marseillaise", and in 1825 he published
Chants français (
French Songs) in which he set to music fifty poems by various authors. His
Essais en vers et en prose (
Essays in Verse and Prose, 1797) contains the
Marseillaise; a
prose tale
Adelaide et Monville of the sentimental kind; and some occasional poems. He returned to public life after the
July Revolution and was awarded the
Legion of Honour by
Louis Philippe I. ==Death==