La Marseillaise

The Franco-Prussian War, initially an attempt by the Second French Empire to reassert its dominance over continental Europe against the Northern German Confederation, would ultimately end in tragedy for the French, with the capture of Napoleon III, the horrors of the Siege of Paris and the Commune, and the fall of the Second Empire. However, at the start of the war, French confidence and nationalist spirit were high. In Gustave Doré’s La Marseillaise, the artist captures France's wartime spirit, enthusiasm and triumphalism during these early days of the conflict. La Marseillaise, from which the drawing takes its name, was declared the anthem of the First Republic in 1795, and was originally entitled Chant de guerre pour l'Armée du Rhin. This title would have had particular resonance during the Franco-Prussian War when the French army was again referring to itself as The Army of the Rhine as they marched on the Prussian Rhineland.

The drawing depicts a personification of Liberté, or perhaps France, wearing a Phrygian cap, raising a sword aloft in one hand and a flag in the other, leading a crowd of armed soldiers and volunteers toward what is surely a battlefield. By depicting her with her mouth open and her eyes skyward, Doré seems to suggest she is leading the crowd in singing La Marseillaise as they march. Though the song had been officially banned by Napoleon III, the war led to a resurgence in its popularity, and Doré apparently planned to create a drawing illustrating each verse of the song. The present drawing possibly relates to the sixth verse, in which liberty is exhorted to fight alongside her defenders.

The political passion and fervor of this moment were such that Doré canceled a long-planned trip to London in order to stay close to his compatriots at home. Though he already knew the horrors of war firsthand, Doré was extremely patriotic and, as Blanchard Jerrold described, ‘seized his pencil, and it became a weapon in his hands by which he stimulated the ardor of his countrymen’ (B. Jerrold, Life of Gustave Doré with one hundred and thirty-eight illustrations from original drawings by Doré, London, 1891, p. 291). The inspiration for the central figure in Doré’s drawing was undoubtedly Delacroix's famous La Liberté guidant le peuple (Louvre, 1830) but he was also inspired by François Rude's sculptural decoration for the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, also called La Marseillaise. During the war years, Doré repeated this same central personification, sometimes winged and sometimes not, almost obsessively in other compositions with a strong patriotic content, known mainly through lithographs and other drawings. See, for example, the sheet in the Cleveland Museum of Art entitled Liberty, which depicts her striding out of the open gate of a prison over the body of a fallen king while breaking chains, the drawing France, Mounted on a Hippogriff, Leads her Children to the Aid of Paris, in Strasbourg, and Le Chant du départ, in which she is holding a torch aloft, current location unknown.

As the German army closed in in Paris and throughout the Siege, Doré continued to draw, becoming one of l'année terrible’s most faithful chroniclers. Afterwards, like many other artists, Doré left France for a time, despondent over the surrendering of his beloved Alsace to the Germans. He finally made his delayed trip to London, and would continue on to Scotland, where he would produce some of his most magnificent and celebrated landscapes, far from the horrors he had seen in the streets of Paris only a few years before.

We are grateful to Dan Malan for confirming the authenticity of this work.