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presence instead. The song wouldn’t inspire a revolution against
him
and neither would the man who wrote it. By the early 1800s – just a decade after writing the song – Rouget was penniless in Paris and being spied on by the police.
    You can pass over the rest of Rouget’s life pretty quickly. He kept on trying to carve out a stable career as a songwriter – he wrote over 200 songs and a number of musical plays. Unfortunately none of them were any good. Whatever perfect alignment of inspiration and ability Rouget had enjoyed on that one night seemed to have left him. The musicals were the sort that got closed down after opening night; the songs the sort that couldn’t even please a drunk. Rouget was forced to move back to his parents’ house. He was then forced to sell it. He was imprisoned for debts. He took up debt collecting. He eventually tried to commit suicide, but failed at that too.
    At one point he even went into porn. A few weeks before going to Marseilles, I visited Lons-le-Saunier and was taken around Rouget’s childhood home by the town’s dapper head of tourism, Dominique Brunet. The flat is now a museum and in a display case I spotted a document, a song manuscript. I could tell it wasn’t ‘La Marseillaise’, but I couldn’t make out the words properly, especially as half of them were hidden behind card. I asked Dominique what it was about. He ummed and aahed and looked embarrassed before turning to an assistant, who giggled.
    ‘Do you have to know?’ he asked, pained. ‘It’s about this girl, Rosette. She’s beautiful, and she’s bathing in a river. Then a man comes along. And … well … you know … they start having sex. Shall we move on?’
    While Rouget was trying his hand at smut, Napoleon was at war with most of Europe, trying to spread France’s values of liberty and freedom (the freedom to be ruled by Napoleon). But he began to suffer serious defeats in Russia and Germany. Millions died and his power started to wane. As the defeats mounted, he became so desperate he even started tolerating the singing of ‘La Marseillaise’ again, hoping it, if nothing else, would bring his troops strength. It didn’t help: in 1814 he was forced to abdicate and was exiled to a small island off the Italian coast. France reverted to monarchy and the new king, Louis XVIII, banned ‘La Marseillaise’ completely. You can’t have an anti-monarchy song sung in a kingdom, after all, and it had provided the soundtrack for the overthrow of his brother. He chose a tune called ‘La Parisienne’ as France’s anthem instead, a song so stuffy you feel you need to be wearing a powdered wig to sing it.
    Rouget did write a song to the new monarch, trying to get in his good books. ‘Long live the king [is] the noble cry of old France,’ it started. But Louis XVIII treated it with the contempt such desperation probably deserved.
    *
    Rouget died in 1836, while living in a countess’s house in the Parisian suburb of Choisy-le-Roi. Old army friends had found him the room, and he spent his final years there relatively happy, making fake ‘original’ manuscripts of ‘La Marseillaise’ to sell for drink money. He didn’t even bother writing the original title of the song on them; they all simply said ‘La Marseillaise’.
    People wanted Rouget’s song, not him, and he knew it. Is that the fate of all anthem composers, to be irrelevant compared to their songs? In Rouget’s case, I just don’t think so. If his personality hadn’t got in the way, he’d at least have been far more known in his day than he was, and so maybe now.
    You can still see the house Rouget died in today. It’s yellow and black, timber-framed, almost medieval in appearance, with a high wall hiding a garden full of 200-year-old yew trees. It’s the last thing you expect to see in modern Paris surrounded by dirty tower blocks and dual carriageways. Rouget had the smallest room at the back and its tiny four-paned window would have