The Song that Went to War Lives On

France lost her “Troubador of the Resistance” this week, but “The Chant of the Partisans,” the song she wrote and inscribed in French hearts and history, did not die with her.

It will be back for sure at almost any commemorative ceremony dealing with France under World War II German occupation and the battle of its resistance fighters to wrest back the nation’s liberty.

Anna Marly, the Russian-born but French-raised composer of The Chant, passed away on February 16 at the age of 88.  She lived her last years in the United States, and died in the Matanuska-Susitna region of Alaska.

But already in her 80s she created a sensation in June 2000 when the returned to France to sing once again the song that made her famous and which still brings tears to the eyes of French men and women who lived through World War II. 

The occasion for her return was the 60th anniversary commemoration of General Charles de Gaulle’s 18th of June, 1940 radio call from England to his occupied countrymen urging them not to give up the fight.

And her song, once heard, is hard to forget.  It starts almost inaudibly with the rhythmic military shuffle of marching feet. 

 Then, ever more stridently, in drum-beat fashion, it issues an insurrectionary call to break out the tools of the trade—rifles, machine guns, knives, grenades and dynamite. 

There is work to be done.  It is dangerous work but patriotic work, liberating work.  And if you fall in the process, it promises, a comrade will step out of the shadows to take your place. 

The Chant was defiantly popular during the Nazi occupation of World War II when it served as the generally accepted rallying call for the French resistance fighters carrying on their guerilla war against German military forces and installations in the country.

The British Broadcasting System (BBC) broadcast it regularly to France, at first under the title "The Guerilla Song," and the Royal Air Force showered the French countryside with leaflets bearing its incendiary lyrics. 

 Members of the underground used it as a recognition code and French men and women in the resistance movement or simply opposed to their Nazi oppressors often whistled it as a sign of defiance. Some did so while they were digging their own graves before being executed by Nazi troops.  The BBC often preferred to broadcast the whistled version because it passed better than the words through German electronic jamming attempts.

The song during the war had such national significance as a Resistance symbol that, in the period immediately after France’s liberation, French children systematically learned the Chant in school, although in a milder version stripped of some of the knife, gun and dynamite references.

Myriad other singers—actor Yves Montand and rock-star Johnny Hallyday are among the best known—produced their own versions after the war but Marly’s remains the point of reference as the official hymn of the French resistance.

Through a complex series of chance but fortuitous encounters, Marly shares its authorship however, with French writers Joseph Kessel and Maurice Druon, both of whom she met in the Free French circles of London during the war and both of whom became members of the illustrious Academie Française in later years.  Marly wrote the music but they wrote the French lyrics.

The reason is that Marly originally had composed the song in 1942 with lyrics in her native Russian language.  She had been born in St. Petersburg in 1917, the year of the Bolshevik revolution, but had been taken immediately by her mother to France when her father was executed by her homeland’s new rulers.  When Germany invaded France in World War II, she and her mother fled once again and wound up in England, where Marly served full time as a volunteer and entertainer at military bases. 

Her Chant was intended originally as a tribute to the Russian underground "Partisans" fighting against the Nazi invaders of the Soviet Union. Accompanying herself and rapping out its staccato rhythms on her ever-present guitar, she explained its general context first to her soldier audiences, then sang it in Russian or sometimes just hummed or whistled it on her morale building tours of military bases.

In was in early 1943, during one of Marly’s performances at the club of the Free French community in London, that Kessel first heard the song and became convinced that with French words it would be just right for the "Army of the Shadows" as the French resistance movement often was called abroad  That movement, whose active guerilla units were known generally in France as the Maquis, the name of the heavy scrub grass terrain into which resistance fighters often melted after launching an attack, still was in its infancy and badly in need of some rallying symbol. 

A series of conferences with Marly and frantic writing sessions by Kessel and Druon produced the final lyrics which were far different from the original Russian ones but, as Marly realized, were better suited to the task at hand.  Because it just seemed to fit, the slavic term "Partisan" for guerilla fighters was kept in the title even though their French counterparts were more generally known as ‘Maquisards’.

Marly, whose Chant had earned her the nickname, "Troubadour of the Resistance," starred in a long series of victory galas, celebrations and performances immediately after France’s Liberation, but, after a time, she decided to move on again, with her guitar, to continue her singing career elsewhere in Europe and both Americas. 

All in all she wrote more than 300 songs including "Paris is Ours" (Paris est à nous)  to celebrate the recapture of the French capital by Free French and other allied forces as well as a more personal, less militant "Partisans’ Complaint" (La Complainte du partisan) evoking the anguish of an underground fighter separated by circumstance from his family and all he holds dear.   The latter was afterward interpreted and sung in English by Joan Baez and by Leonard Cohen.

 Decorated by the Free French movement and lauded by De Gaulle himself for using "her talent as an arm for France," Marly retired years ago in Richfield Springs, New York.

Her death certainly will bring her Chant back into circulation and, if you hear it again and remember it from the war, you can be excused if you need your handkerchief.  You won’t be alone.

Marly died in Alaska, where she was living, on February 15.

 Copyright © Robert Korengold