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to be a true republican. In it, darkness covers the universe and ‘impure vapours’ take the throne, presumably a reference to Louis XVI, then there are the words ‘It rolls …’, the most undramatic reference to a king’s head being cut off you could ever come across.
    Rouget was released in 1794, and surprisingly soon let back into the army. Then, a year later, his song became the official national anthem of France – the victory song of the Revolution. But Rouget couldn’t walk around Paris milking the achievement, celebrated as the author of one of the world’s most famous songs (by that point, it had travelled to the US as well as most of Europe). Once a person was labelled a royalist in revolutionary France, it took a long time to shake off the label. He had to just sit on his hands, do as he was told and bide his time. He got a poor job liaising with the Dutch embassy in Paris.
    His life should have got better with the rise of Napoleon, and indeed for a while it looked as though things for him might be getting back on track. He was close to Napoleon’s wife, Josephine (there were rumours of an affair), and she nudged her husband until one day he gave Rouget extra work, asking him to ferry gifts to the Spanish royal family like a cut-price ambassador (Josephine used Rouget’s appointment to commit fraud, getting him to take Parisian novelties with him so she could avoid export taxes).
    Rouget could have simply done a good job and gradually re-established his reputation. Unfortunately, he was a letter writer, the sort of person who thinks nothing of sending a ten-page missive to his boss every time he has a problem, and spends the first nine of those failing to get to the point. Worse, he was a letter writer who didn’t get disheartened, a man who believed that truth and honesty would always win out. So when Napoleon didn’t write back to his first rant, Rouget simply sent him another letter, and another, and another, getting more wound up with each line.
    The letters all started because some Frenchmen stole a Dutch ship along with several million francs’ worth of cargo. The Dutch were unable to get their money back, even after going to the courts. A travesty, Rouget thought; the ultimate insult to these brave allies of France. How could Napoleon think he’d keep the loyalty of that country and its 200,000 soldiers if he couldn’t even keep their ships safe? So Rouget wrote Napoleon a letter on their behalf, pleading for justice. And that letter led to lots and lots more. And after a few, they stopped saying anything about the Dutch and just became personal.
    ‘Bonaparte,’ he writes in one, ‘you’ve lost yourself, and what’s worse, you’ve lost France with you … Whatever your plan, you’ve misplaced it, whatever your projects they’ve become a catastrophe.’ In another he simply says: ‘Are you happy? I can’t believe it.’ Some of the letters are devastating assassinations of life in Napoleonic France. ‘The national spirit is nothing but fake enthusiasm,’ he writes. ‘The national interest has become the interests of one family, the national glory nothing but the foul sewer of sycophancy.’ He takes apart priests, generals, judges and officials. They’re all liars and thieves, bringers of ‘the stupid tyranny under which we’re graced’. He occasionally gives Napoleon credit, says he’ll be able to turn things around, and pretends he didn’t mean anything he’d just said. But those platitudes are tossed in at the end: a few words that clearly aren’t going to stop the flames started by the thousands before. It takes some guts – or a spectacular lack of judgement – to write letters like that.
    Napoleon, unsurprisingly, didn’t take well to any of these missives and he did what anyone would: he disowned ‘La Marseillaise’, suspending the decree that had made it the anthem in 1795, letting his hatred of it be well known and calling for other songs to be played in his