La Marseillaise: The Revolutionary Anthem of the Future
Born as a battle song, La Marseillaise became one of the world’s great musical symbols of revolution. On Simchat Torah 1973, the Lubavitcher Rebbe took that very melody and turned it toward holiness. Within months, France itself changed the sound of its national anthem. Nearly twenty years later, the Rebbe returned to the story and added: “There will be more news.” A prophecy still awaiting its fulfillment.
In the midst of the Simchat Torah celebrations of 1973, the Lubavitcher Rebbe suddenly began singing a melody no one expected to hear at 770 Eastern Parkway, the world headquarters of Chabad-Lubavitch.
It was the national anthem of France.
To the melody of La Marseillaise — born in the French Revolution and inseparable from its call to arms — the Rebbe sang the words of an ancient Jewish hymn:
HaAderet VeHaEmunah l’Chai Olamim —
“Majesty and faithfulness belong to the One who lives eternally.”
This was more than fitting Jewish words to a famous tune.
The Rebbe would later describe what had happened in far more radical terms. A melody of revolution had undergone what Chassidic thought calls it’hapcha: transformation. The force itself was not suppressed or discarded. It was redirected.
The music remained.
The revolution changed sides.
The Sound of Revolution
La Marseillaise was written in 1792, amid the French Revolution and France’s war against Austria. Its original title was War Song for the Army of the Rhine. Within months, however, it had become the music of the Revolution itself.1
Its path to becoming France’s permanent national anthem was anything but straightforward. It fell out of official favor under Napoleon and was banned during the Bourbon Restoration. Only in 1879 was it firmly reestablished as the anthem of the French Republic.1
But by then its significance had spread far beyond France.
During the nineteenth century, revolutionary movements across Europe adopted versions and adaptations of La Marseillaise. Its musical vocabulary entered classical works, political movements and popular culture.
It was no longer merely the anthem of one country.
It had become one of the world’s most recognizable sounds of revolution.
And that was precisely the melody the Rebbe chose.
The Night La Marseillaise Entered 770
The timing was extraordinary.
It was October 1973. Less than two weeks earlier, Egypt and Syria had attacked Israel on Yom Kippur. The war was still underway. Against that background, the Rebbe repeatedly emphasized the need not to retreat into fear, but to respond with extraordinary joy.2
There was also an unusually large group of visitors from France in 770 that Simchat Torah — some sixty young men and women, many of them only beginning to discover a more observant Jewish life. Among them was a young Chaim Shneur Nissenbaum, visiting the Rebbe from France for only the second time.2
Before the hakafah began, something unusual happened.
The Rebbe specifically asked for all the guests from France to gather in the center of the synagogue. Seeing that some were still scattered through the enormous crowd, he asked — in French — whether everyone had come and instructed that the remaining French visitors be called forward.2
Only when they had gathered did the hakafah begin.
An elder Chassid started a familiar niggun, a Chassidic melody.
The Rebbe did not join in.
Gradually, people sensed that he was waiting for something else. The singing subsided.
Then the Rebbe stepped to the edge of his platform, opened his prayer book, turned toward the crowd — and began to sing.
Most of the thousands packed into 770 had no idea what they were hearing.
The words were familiar: HaAderet VeHaEmunah, an alphabetical hymn traditionally sung during the Simchat Torah dancing.
The melody was not.
Then one of the French visitors suddenly recognized it:
It was La Marseillaise.
The French group immediately joined in. The Americans around them struggled to follow the unfamiliar melody.
For the young visitors, Nissenbaum later recalled, it felt like an intensely personal moment — something the Rebbe had given specifically to the Jews of France.2
Eyewitnesses remembered another intriguing musical detail. The Rebbe appears to have sung more of the original French melody than the crowd initially managed to retain. The following Simchat Torah, he prompted the Chassidim to include the missing musical passage as well.3
The appropriation was deliberate: not merely a famous opening phrase, but the French melody itself.
A Different French Revolution
The next day, the Rebbe called the French visitors forward again.
They were scattered among the thousands crowded into the synagogue. Some climbed over tables and people to reach the center.
Then the Rebbe addressed them in French.
He gave them l’chaim and spoke of “la révolution en France” — a revolution in France against the Yetzer Hara, the inclination toward evil, carried out with joy and inspiration, leading toward the coming of Moshiach.2
Then he began the new melody again.
There was only one problem.
The French visitors knew La Marseillaise. They did not all know the Hebrew words of HaAderet VeHaEmunah by heart.
So they began singing the melody without words.
The Rebbe smiled and called for people to give them siddurim, prayer books.
Nissenbaum remembers the books suddenly coming toward them from all over 770. Within moments, the French group had the words and joined in.2
“We brought this song back to France” — together with an extraordinary sense that they could change the country.2
The Rebbe himself made clear that this was the point. He later explained that his intention had not been simply to teach someone in Brooklyn a new melody. The Jews of France were to take it home and march with it toward the Redemption.2
The revolution was meant to return to France.
Napoleon’s March: An Earlier Transformation
There was a striking precedent.
More than a century earlier, Rabbi Shneur Zalman of Liadi, founder of Chabad and known as the Alter Rebbe, had fiercely opposed Napoleon during the French invasion of Russia in 1812.
Yet Chabad tradition records that he took the military march associated with Napoleon’s army — the music of the very force he opposed — and claimed it for holiness.
According to the tradition, after hearing the tune used by the French troops, Rabbi Shneur Zalman identified it as a song of victory. The melody survived in Chabad as “Napoleon’s March” and is still sung at the close of Yom Kippur.4
The paradox is striking.
Napoleon lost.
His march survived — in the spiritual world of those who had opposed him.
The Rebbe explicitly connected what he had done with La Marseillaise to that earlier act.5
There was even a curious historical echo. For a series of Simchat Torah celebrations, the Rebbe introduced melodies that became identified as his distinctive niggunim. Then the pattern stopped. Nearly a decade passed before another such melody suddenly appeared.
And this one, like Napoleon’s March before it, came from revolutionary France.
The Axe Made From the Tree
On the Shabbat following Simchat Torah 1973, the Rebbe explained the principle behind what had happened with an ancient Talmudic image:
The wood for the handle of the axe that fells the forest comes from the forest itself.6
The Alter Rebbe had used the other side’s own victory march and turned it into a march of spiritual victory. Now the Rebbe had done something analogous with La Marseillaise.
The point was not to neutralize the force.
It was to take the force itself and change the direction in which it moved.
This is it’hapcha: not merely overcoming darkness, but transforming the darkness itself into light.
The melody was not censored.
It was not softened.
It was not replaced by a gentler Jewish tune.
The same musical energy was given a different destination.
A Revolution Within the Revolution
The Rebbe returned to the theme repeatedly.
Two years later, on Simchat Torah 1975, when a French song was called for during a gathering devoted to the influence of the Jewish people upon the nations of the world, participants sang La Marseillaise.
The Rebbe responded with a startling phrase:
“A revolution against exile and against the Yetzer Hara!”7
The word revolution was no later literary invention. It was part of the Rebbe’s own description of what the melody had become.
And in 1989, two hundred years after the French Revolution, the Rebbe returned to the idea again in the presence of visitors from France.
He referred to the melody as the song of France “as it has been transformed into holiness” and spoke of transforming the French Revolution itself — turning revolutionary energy toward the spread of Torah, Judaism and Chassidic teaching.8
France had supplied the music of revolution.
The Rebbe was proposing a revolution within the revolution itself.
Why HaAderet VeHaEmunah?
Why these particular words?
The Rebbe initially offered a practical explanation: HaAderet VeHaEmunah follows the Hebrew alphabet, making the words easier to remember.
But in later talks, he revealed a deeper connection.
The hymn moves from aleph to tav, through the twenty-two letters with which, Jewish mystical tradition teaches, the world was created. Its successive phrases attribute majesty, faithfulness, understanding, blessing, greatness, glory and the rest of existence’s powers to Chai Olamim — the One who gives life to the worlds.9
The choice of words therefore changes the meaning of the music at its foundation.
A song born from human revolution becomes a song declaring that the forces of the world, from aleph to tav, belong to their Divine source.
And then, in 1991, the Rebbe introduced an even more remarkable idea.
The Secret of an Anthem
Jewish mystical tradition sees a nation as more than a political entity.
A great nation also has a spiritual counterpart — a sar, literally a “prince”: an angelic or spiritual power representing the nation’s root above.
This is an old idea in Jewish sources. The biblical account of the Exodus, for example, is interpreted by Rashi as referring not only to Egypt below but to the “prince of Egypt” above.10
In an earlier Chabad teaching discussing the spiritual princes of major nations, France itself is explicitly named, alongside Russia and America.11
But in 1991, the Rebbe added a striking musical dimension.
Every country, he observed, has symbols that represent it: a flag and a distinctive national melody. He then suggested that a nation’s anthem is connected to its spiritual sar.12
That makes what happened in 1973 look very different.
The Rebbe had not simply borrowed a piece of French music.
Within this spiritual framework, he had touched something that represented France itself.
And there is an earlier Chassidic teaching that goes further still.
Rabbi Levi Yitzchak of Berditchev asks how a righteous person can influence a nation to turn favorably toward the Jewish people.
His answer is extraordinary.
The nation below has a spiritual root above. Its sar has a song. The source from which the sar receives its vitality, the song of the sar, and the nation that unfolds from it below are intertwined.
If the tzaddik knows that song, Rabbi Levi Yitzchak teaches, he can act upon the nation at its root. In his interpretation of the Purim story, Mordechai understood the songs associated with the spiritual princes of the nations — and through them was able to affect what unfolded in the political world below.13
The implication for La Marseillaise is difficult to miss.
To influence a nation below, the tzaddik reaches its spiritual root above. And song can be the point of access.
A Miracle Almost No One Noticed
Nearly twenty years after that Simchat Torah, on Shabbat Vayeishev 1991, the Rebbe returned to France and its melody in a much larger discussion about the transformation of the world.
The question underlying the talk was profound.
If the world was truly moving toward Redemption, where was the evidence?
Why did everyday reality still look so ordinary?
The Rebbe’s answer was that extraordinary transformations can take place through apparently natural processes — and because they happen naturally, people may fail to recognize what has occurred.
France, he argued, was an example.
A country whose spiritual climate had once stood in sharp opposition to Chassidic life had itself become a major center of Torah and Chassidic activity. In the Rebbe’s description, France had undergone a spiritual revolution.
The English edition of the talk published by Sichos in English presents the transformation of its national melody as one of the striking signs of that larger change.12
The Rebbe recalled how Chassidim had begun singing France’s revolutionary anthem to HaAderet VeHaEmunah.
Then, he said, something remarkable happened in France itself.
The national melody changed.
The published English adaptation describes alterations to “certain chords and rhythms” and records the explanation offered by elder Chassidim: it was as though France had handed its anthem over to the Chassidim.12
What had actually happened?
When France Changed the Sound of La Marseillaise
In April 1974, only months after that Simchat Torah, French President Georges Pompidou died in office. He died at night on April 2 — by the Jewish calendar, the night of 11 Nissan, the Rebbe’s birthday.14
The election that followed brought Valéry Giscard d’Estaing to the presidency.
Under Giscard, the performance of La Marseillaise was changed. Its tempo was slowed, giving the anthem a more measured, less sharply martial character. The change did not last indefinitely: after François Mitterrand became president in 1981, the faster performance returned.15
For the Rebbe, however, the significance of the episode went far beyond tempo.
He reported the explanation of elder Chassidim: once the melody had been transformed into a song of holiness, that transformation had been sensed, so to speak, by France’s spiritual source above — and eventually found expression in France below.12
The change in the music was evidence of a change in the nation.
But this is where the story becomes stranger.
“There Will Yet Be News About This”
The edited version of the 1991 talk speaks carefully of a change in the national melody.
The unedited transcript is much more startling.
There, the Rebbe repeatedly described the transformation as though La Marseillaise had actually ceased to be the official anthem of France.
He said that France had, in effect, “given over” its melody to the Chassidim.
And he emphasized the paradox: the very same melody that had symbolized the French Revolution had become a Chassidic niggun.
This was not a passing phrase. In the unedited record, the Rebbe returned to the point three times.16
There was an obvious problem.
La Marseillaise was still the national anthem of France.
And the musical change of the 1970s had already been reversed.
Rabbi Simon Jacobson, one of the editors responsible for preparing the Rebbe’s talks for publication, later described what happened next. The editors investigated the historical record. With material obtained from Rabbi Shmuel Azimov in France, they established that the earlier change had indeed been reversed.
They wrote to the Rebbe.
His answer was brief:
“There will yet be news about this through natural means; it is not their task to run ahead of the news.”16
The editors had pointed to a reality that seemed not to fit the Rebbe’s words.
The Rebbe did not withdraw them.
There would yet be news.
The Same Melody, the Same Notes
There is a phrase in the unedited talk that deserves particular attention.
The Rebbe emphasized that this was:
“the same melody — with the same movements.”16
That is the heart of the story.
Sometimes, when music from outside the Chassidic world is absorbed into Chassidic tradition, the music itself changes. It is reshaped, softened or adapted.
Here the Rebbe emphasized the opposite.
The same melody.
The same musical movements.
A completely different meaning.
That may be one of the clearest musical expressions of it’hapcha.
Transformation does not necessarily mean destroying an old power and replacing it with a new one.
Sometimes it means taking the very same power and changing what it serves.
Why Tell the Story Now?
The Rebbe then asked a question that changes the meaning of the entire episode:
Why speak about this now, nearly twenty years later?
His answer reached beyond France and beyond music.
Recognizing a miracle, giving thanks for it and making it known, he explained, is not merely a way of remembering something that has already happened. Recognition itself can become part of the process of Redemption.
The published English edition makes this point explicitly, invoking the Talmudic account of King Hezekiah, who failed to sing praise after a miraculous deliverance. Taking notice of miracles, the editors explain, is itself significant in hastening the Redemption.12
For the Rebbe, then, telling the story of La Marseillaise was not historical nostalgia.
Recognizing the transformation was itself part of moving the transformation forward.
From “To Arms!” to “They Shall Learn War No More”
And here the words of La Marseillaise itself return to the center of the story.
The anthem begins with a call to battle:
Aux armes, citoyens!
To arms, citizens!
It speaks the language of war, blood, enemies and weapons.1
The Jewish vision of Redemption points in the opposite direction.
That transformation is not limited to the Jewish people. The nations themselves are called toward a world ordered by justice, the sanctity of human life and recognition of the Creator — a universal moral order expressed in Jewish tradition through the Seven Noahide Laws.
And Isaiah gives that future its most famous words:
“Nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore.”17
This makes the transformation of La Marseillaise more than an intriguing episode in Chassidic musical history.
A song that cries “To arms!” becomes:
HaAderet VeHaEmunah l’Chai Olamim.
Not a weakening of the energy.
Not the erasure of its revolutionary force.
The force itself transformed.
The Revolution Is Not Over
There is one final historical irony.
The question of La Marseillaise and its martial language did not disappear.
In 1992 — the bicentenary of the anthem, and within months of the Rebbe’s remarks — a public initiative led by Abbé Pierre called for its violent language to be reconsidered. More than a hundred public figures supported the effort, including Danielle Mitterrand and Charles Aznavour.18
The initiative did not change France’s official anthem.
Nor have later attempts to rewrite or replace its more violent language done so. In 2025 and 2026, petitions on the French National Assembly’s official platform again proposed changing a controversial line or replacing the anthem altogether; these efforts remained marginal and produced no official change.19
The point is not that any one of these initiatives fulfills the Rebbe’s words. He never specified what form the future development would take.
But the question itself has remained alive:
What should the revolutionary anthem of France ultimately say?
For the Rebbe, however, the deepest transformation had already begun elsewhere.
In 1792, La Marseillaise was born as a battle song of the French Revolution.
It crossed borders, accompanied revolutions and became one of the world’s great musical symbols of rebellion and political upheaval.
On Simchat Torah 1973, that same melody entered 770.
The Rebbe did not replace it.
He did not soften it.
He took the same melody, with the same movements, and sang:
HaAderet VeHaEmunah l’Chai Olamim.
HaBinah VeHaBerachah l’Chai Olamim.
HaGe’ut VeHaGedulah l’Chai Olamim.
Majesty and faithfulness.
Understanding and blessing.
Grandeur and greatness.
All directed toward the Source of life.
The revolution was not abolished.
The revolution itself was revolutionized.
In 1792 — a revolution in France.
On Simchat Torah 1973 — a revolution within the revolution.
And next?
There will be more news.
Notes and Sources
- For the history and official text of La Marseillaise, see the French Presidency, “La Marseillaise by Rouget de Lisle”. ↩
- For the French group at 770, the Rebbe’s call for all the French visitors to gather, his remarks in French and Chaim Shneur Nissenbaum’s recollections, see Chabad.org, “The Rebbe’s French Revolution”. See also the English Living Torah interview, “A French Revolution”. ↩
- Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak Wilshansky’s recollection of the additional musical passage; see the contemporary accounts and later recollections cited in the Hebrew research version of this article. ↩
- On the Chabad tradition of Napoleon’s March and its adoption by Rabbi Shneur Zalman of Liadi, see “Napoleon Lost. His March Won”, with sources cited there. ↩
- Talk of Shabbat Bereishit 5734 (1973), where the Rebbe explicitly connected the transformation of La Marseillaise to the Alter Rebbe’s use of Napoleon’s March. ↩
- Sanhedrin 39b; Tanya, ch. 31. The Rebbe applied the image in the talk of Shabbat Bereishit 5734 to the transformation of the French melody. ↩
- Diary account of Simchat Torah 5736 (1975): in the sequence of songs associated with the nations of the world, the words of La Marseillaise were sung in French and the Rebbe declared it a “revolution against exile and against the Yetzer Hara.” ↩
- Talk of 12 Tammuz 5749 (1989), marking two hundred years since the French Revolution; the Rebbe described the French melody as transformed into holiness and spoke of redirecting the revolutionary force of France toward Torah, Judaism and Chassidic teaching. ↩
- See the Rebbe’s remarks of 12 Tammuz 5749 and related talks on HaAderet VeHaEmunah, the twenty-two Hebrew letters and the revelation of Chai Olamim throughout creation. ↩
- Rashi on Exodus 14:10, s.v. “And behold, Egypt was traveling after them,” citing the “prince of Egypt” above. ↩
- Toras Shalom, pp. 204–205; cited in the Rebbe’s talk of Shabbat Vayeishev 5752, note 49. France, Russia and America are explicitly named there among major nations associated with a distinct spiritual sar. ↩
- The Lubavitcher Rebbe, Shabbat Vayeishev 5752 (1991), English adaptation in Sichos in English: “The Spiritual French Revolution: A Miracle in Our Times”. The published English version is a free translation/adaptation rather than a verbatim transcript. ↩
- Kedushat Levi, second teaching for Purim, on influencing a nation through the song associated with its spiritual sar, and on Mordechai’s knowledge of the songs of the seventy spiritual princes. ↩
- Georges Pompidou died at 9:00 p.m. on April 2, 1974; by the Jewish calendar this was the night of 11 Nissan 5734, the Rebbe’s birthday. ↩
- On the slowing of La Marseillaise under Valéry Giscard d’Estaing and the later restoration of the faster tempo under François Mitterrand, see the French Presidency, official history of La Marseillaise; see also Giscard’s December 1974 remarks in the French presidential archive. ↩
- Unedited transcript of the Rebbe’s talk, Shabbat Vayeishev 5752, Sichot Kodesh 5752, vol. 2, p. 426ff. The editorial history, including the inquiry about the reversal of the French anthem change and the Rebbe’s response that “there will yet be news about this through natural means,” was preserved in the editors’ recollections. ↩
- Isaiah 2:4. ↩
- On the 1992 debate and Abbé Pierre’s call to revise the anthem’s violent language, see The Washington Post, July 14, 1992, “French Call for Toned-Down Anthem”. ↩
- See the French National Assembly petition platform: petition to change “Qu’un sang impur abreuve nos sillons”, and proposal to replace the anthem. ↩
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