Republic or Death! (3 page)

YOU CAN'T ARGUE
with French women. You just can't. Even when they seem to be trying to get you to take illegal substances.

‘
Tu dois acheter des drogues
,' says Catherine, a forty-something in a yellow dress and shades who's stopped her car to check that the person collapsed on a bike by the side of the road, his sweat pooling around the wheels, is actually alive.

‘You should buy some drugs,' she repeats, laughing. She's got a point. I'm starting to realise just why the Tour de France has so many scandals. EPO, human growth hormone, nandrolone, amphetamines – right now, any of them would be welcome, as long as it helped me up this hill. This bloody hill. She roots around in her car and gives me a half-drunk bottle of water. ‘Will this do instead?' she says. I can still hear her laughing as she drives off.

You're not supposed to look bedraggled in Provence. Countryside like this is meant for sitting outside cafes wearing a white suit and a wide-brimmed hat, a carafe of wine on the go. Sweat's not supposed to come into it. From where I'm standing, halfway up this hill, I can look down over that countryside for miles. It's all family-owned vineyards and dry, dirt fields, with tractors rolling around in them throwing up dust clouds. There's sunlight glaring off the white-walled, orange-roofed farmhouses, and there are plane trees leaning over every driveway making even the poorest places look stately. It's stunning, and yet this view makes me realise I've perhaps made a mistake. I've been travelling only a few hours now and only twenty minutes of that uphill, but I'm already a wreck. I still have 500 miles to go before I reach the Jardin des Tuileries in the centre of Paris. I've never cycled more than 12 miles in a day before; I've given myself a week. Yes, I think I was rather optimistic with my calculations too.

There's a good reason I'm doing this though. I've set out to cycle the route of ‘La Marseillaise', the most famous national anthem of them all. It's a song you can sing from Argentina to Bhutan and everyone will know it. They might not speak French, but they can certainly shout its boisterous tune. It's a song that pushes you to get louder, to pump your fist higher, with every line. It's really the closest an anthem ever gets to a pop song: a melody so simple you can't get it out of your blood after the first time you've heard it. You could play it on a French horn, a violin or even a tambourine and it'd be unmistakable.

Soon after it was written, an English historian wrote, ‘The sound of it will make the blood tingle in men's veins, and whole armies will sing it, with eyes weeping and burning, with hearts defiant of death, despot and evil.' A French general used to say it was worth 1,000 extra men in battle. A German poet once wrote that it was responsible for the death of 50,000 of his countrymen. Everyone from Wagner to the Beatles has stolen that melody, and it's popped up, translated, in the US, Brazil and Russia. It symbolises France to the world, even if much of France apparently hates it. A lot of people here see it as vicious and violent – and to be fair to them, they're right. ‘La Marseillaise' is a seven-verse call to arms, trying to encourage people to fight by telling them invaders are coming ‘to slit the throats of our wives and children'. There's even a children's verse so kids can sing about hoping to share their dad's coffin. It's not the world's most violent anthem by a long way – Western Sahara's repeatedly urges people to ‘cut off the head of the invader'; Vietnam's to build ‘the path to glory … on the bodies of our foes'. But the perception that it is is unshakable. And all in all, it's hardly what you'd associate with the country of love, sex and champagne.

Many people here also think it's an incredibly racist song; a colonial tune. That all comes down to the chorus. ‘
Aux armes, citoyens!
' it shouts:

Qu'un sang impur

Abreuve nos sillons
.

—

To arms, citizens!

…

Let's water the fields

With impure blood.

But then you walk into a French sports stadium and see the pride on people's faces when they sing it. How can you understand such a contradiction? How can you grasp the relationship between one of the greatest songs of all time and what it is to be French? Can an anthem like this still mean something in a modern, multicultural country?

Well, in my opinion, you have to travel across France to get answers to any of those questions. And you have to destroy yourself cycling up hills. Most of all, you have to start in Marseilles.

*

About 200 years ago, in July 1792, 517 men and two cannons left Marseilles, on the coast at the bottom of France, and marched all the way north to Paris. They were responding to an advert written by one of the city's leading revolutionaries, Charles Barbaroux, asking for ‘600 men who know how to die'. ‘You're needed to march and strike down the tyrant,' it said, adding, somewhat obviously, that anyone thinking of applying must know how to hold arms. Volunteers must also know how to read and write, it said, which seem somewhat superfluous skills, but show you he wasn't going to let just anyone get involved.

France was in the middle of the Revolution that would eventually see it get rid of its king, Louis XVI, and his decadent wife, Marie Antoinette. Its government had already severely limited the king's powers (the year before, he'd tried to flee abroad, so horrified was he about what was happening). However, there were fears Austria and the Prussian Empire were about to invade, to force Paris to roll things back to how they used to be. The men of Marseilles wanted to stop Louis reclaiming even a fraction of his former powers and so they set off for Paris. They marched for twenty-eight days straight, first over the Chaîne de l'Étoile mountains and along the Rhône valley to Lyon, and then on and on and on, through fields and the forests of Saulieu, all the way to the capital. And every weary step they sang a song. When they began their journey it was known by a mouthful of a title: ‘Le Chant de Guerre pour l'Armée du Rhin' (‘The War Song of the Rhine Army'). But not long after they reached their destination, it had become simply ‘La Marseillaise', and those 517 men had become legends. Well, 516 of them had; one, Claude Lagoutte, drank too much and died of a ‘sudden illness' en route.

I'd decided to follow in the footsteps of these men, though by bike obviously. When I made that decision, I was mighty pleased with myself. I assumed that as long as I avoided drinking like Claude, it'd be easy. I was wrong.

*

Marseilles is the least French of French cities, with a more Mediterranean than Gallic feel to it. You step out of the station on to a wide art deco staircase leading down towards the sea with people stretched out lazing on it, almost asleep. No one is hassling you to buy a knocked-off Louis Vuitton bag or a black-market DVD, unlike outside most other major train stations in Europe. The hills surround the city like a suntrap and the heat has an intensity which says, ‘Sit down, have a drink. Relax. Don't worry yourself.' It's hard to picture anyone managing to work hard here, which makes it a little surprising that the city used to be one of Europe's busiest ports, its fortune built on trade. Ships still pour in and out of the dock, but today they are mostly yachts, not container vessels. The city itself hasn't changed much since the time of ‘La Marseillaise'. The streets of the old town are still as narrow as they were then, lined with five-or six-storey homes so close together you could practically shake hands with your opposite neighbour each morning. Every building is a different pastel shade – orange, yellow, cream – giving the whole area the dreamlike feel of an Impressionist painting.

Just a short walk from the station, in the courtyard of the Mémorial de la Marseillaise, the city's museum to the song, I meet Frédéric Frank-David, the museum director. He's a neatly bearded, ginger thirty-something and he laughs when I tell him I'm about to cycle the route. ‘You do realise the soldiers marched at night, don't you?' he says. ‘You'd have to be an idiot to do it in the daytime. See how hot it is here. When are you leaving?'

‘In about five minutes,' I reply. It's midday.

Frédéric is meant to be the number one fan of ‘La Marseillaise', but he's an odd candidate for the role: he's young and liberal, a man who's as open about the song's problems as he is about its joys. ‘The problem with “La Marseillaise”,' he says over coffee, ‘is that everyone looks at it today, and they see it gets sung by people on the far right – le Front National – and so everyone says it's violent, ugly and racist. But you've got to look beyond that. The song shouldn't mean those things. What it should be is a symbol of revolution. The French Revolution was about giving ideals to the world – liberty, equality. And the song was part of that and is about those ideals.

‘When people started looking for independence in South America, they sang “La Marseillaise”. In China at the end of the nineteenth century, when they were trying to get rid of Europeans, they sang “La Marseillaise” – in Chinese of course. They sang it in Tiananmen Square too. It's been sung everywhere there's been a revolution.'

The main reason I wanted to meet Frédéric was to try to learn a bit more about the marchers themselves before I set off. But it turns out that little is known. Frédéric can rattle off many of their names – François Moisson, Pierre Garnier, André Carvin – but then it all gets a bit hazy. Their average age was twenty-nine, but there was a fourteen-year-old drummer, Joseph Camas, and a fifty-five-year-old teacher, Etienne Gaugain. Frédéric says the main recruiters were journalists and lawyers, members of the revolutionary Jacobin Club, but the volunteers themselves were more often than not artisans, craftsmen and shopkeepers. The odd merchant. They must have been reasonably well educated given they could read and write. And if they could sing ‘La Marseillaise', they were definitely so. In the 1790s, only about 10 per cent of people in the whole of France could speak French, the language of the elite. In Marseilles, they spoke Provençal or Occitan (
langue d'oc
); in the rest of the country languages like Breton and Alsatian. It was a good hundred years before French was basically forced on everyone.

The men were promised 600 livres each for their efforts – the equivalent of twenty-five gold coins. That doesn't seem like much of an incentive for men with decent jobs to risk their lives, but their desire to take part in the endeavour makes more sense when you consider the one thing we do know about them for sure: they suffered from something of an inferiority complex, residents of a city that tended to be the butt of jokes in the capital and had to respond to its every whim. ‘There was this feeling at the time that leaving the Revolution to Paris might be a catastrophe,' Frédéric says. ‘And their role, their mission to save the Revolution, was very important for these men because they had always had this feeling of being despised by Paris, and of being too far from Paris. This was their time for revenge almost, for reversing the course of things and saying, “Marseilles is important to France. It will keep things together when Paris can't.”'

Revenge found its soundtrack in ‘La Marseillaise'. The song was sung for the first time in Marseilles on 22 June by François Mireur, a medical student. He was attending a meeting calling for marchers. Why he sang it isn't known, since it had actually been written for an army 500 miles away in east France (more on that in due course). He probably picked up a song sheet off a town crier – the eighteenth-century equivalent of buying a tabloid. Perhaps he was moved by the song's sentiment or perhaps he simply wanted to liven up the meeting. Whatever the reason, from Mireur's lips the song spread through the city's streets, until it had worked its way into every home, every corner. A few weeks later, at 7 p.m. on 2 July, the 517 men met outside a courthouse. The Jacobin leaders gave each of them a red hat, one of the symbols of the Revolution, and a leaflet with the words to ‘La Marseillaise'. ‘The song was there to motivate, to keep them going,' says Frédéric. ‘The Jacobins banned every other song. It was a bit of a brainwashing.'

Now, propped up against a crash barrier halfway up a hill above Marseilles, having left Frédéric two hours earlier, I am in such desperate need of motivation myself that I consider singing the song like they did, but I'm just too exhausted, my throat too dry even after slugging back Catherine's water. Maybe if I wait long enough another car will stop, this time with some actual drugs.

*

I eventually manage to pick myself up and get over the hill without the help of ‘La Marseillaise' or anything stronger and over the next two days I head north, first to Aix-en-Provence, a town that overflows with cheese, meat and fruit stalls, and then on to Avignon, former home of the popes, where a 6-metre-tall, 4.5-tonne gold statue of the Virgin Mary looks down on the city from her place atop the cathedral bell tower. The papacy was relocated here when a Frenchman, Clement V, was elected pope and refused to go to Rome.

The 517 Marseillais soldiers passed through both these towns on their march – and caused mayhem in each. In both cases, they arrived at first light, unannounced, and immediately demanded the town's mayor bring them all the food and wine he could. Then they spent hours drinking, trying to recruit, swearing about the king and, of course, bellowing ‘La Marseillaise'. And then they'd start fighting. They'd fight anyone they thought opposed the Revolution, anyone who refused to join them, and, if they couldn't find any of either, they'd fight each other. They'd only been going a few days, but fearful rumours started racing ahead of them, reaching towns all over France. People prayed they wouldn't visit their town next.

But it's not these towns that leave the biggest impression on me during the first few days of my trip, interesting and beautiful as they are. It's the countryside. The route from Aix to Avignon along the Durance river is all agriculture: orchards so overflowing with apples and pears the farmers don't complain when people stop their cars to pick them; fields full of any vegetable you can name and plenty you can't. The only buildings in sight are the occasional farmhouses, which couldn't look more picturesque. They're slightly ramshackle, with windows that don't quite seem to fit the frames, but they're still postcard perfect. I expect they are the main reason so many foreigners move to Provence: they dream of sitting in those sun-drenched gardens or running their hands along dusty bottles of wine in cool cellars.