Chant de Gloire de nos Résistants

“Le Chant des partisans” — sometimes called “La Marseillaise de la Libération” — carries an especially powerful symbolism. This musical allegory of the struggle against the German occupier has retained, across the decades, the stature of a patriotic anthem, and it remains one of the few songs of the Resistance still performed at official ceremonies.

It is one of three official French patriotic anthems — after La Marseillaise and Le Chant du départ — under a government decree of 1962.

The melody was composed by a young Russian woman, Anna Marly (1917–2006), who fled Russia after her father’s execution in Petrograd (Saint Petersburg) during the Bolshevik Revolution. After a period as a dancer with the Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo, she fled the war to England and enlisted as a canteen worker with the Forces françaises libres under General de Gaulle. She soon put her artistic talents at the service of the Resistance, singing for British, Czech and Polish soldiers in the Théâtre aux armées. On tour at a British naval base in 1941, she read in the newspaper of the role played by Soviet partisans at the Battle of Smolensk (Eastern Front, Russia), and composed — in Russian — a song called Marche des partisans: “I scratched out a few notes and improvised words already evoking the flight of crows. I went back on stage and dared to hum it, beating on my guitar to mark the tramp of soldiers’ feet. The smoke-filled hall was packed with sailors. When my improvised song ended, the English sailors first fell silent, almost reverent — a hypnotic silence. Then they burst into thunderous applause, stamping their feet frantically.”

The melancholy song was a great success, and Anna Marly performed it several times on stage. At one such performance it was heard by Emmanuel d’Astier de la Vigerie, a journalist and Compagnon de la Libération, who suggested the stirring tune to André Gillois, host of the daily program Honneur et patrie, broadcast by British radio for Free France between 1940 and 1944: “Ici Londres, les Français parlent aux Français,” he announced each evening. Whistled, without words, “La Marche des partisans” became the program’s signature tune from 17 May 1943 to 2 May 1944. For d’Astier de la Vigerie, founder of the Libération-Sud movement, who believed that “a war is only won with songs,” the conclusion was simple: the Resistance needed its own anthem.

The decisive meeting for its composition took place a few days later, at an evening gathering of the Combat network. Joseph Kessel, newly arrived in England with his companion Germaine Sablon and his nephew Maurice Druon, was captivated by the tune. Under the guidance of Emmanuel d’Astier de la Vigerie, who gave them Anna Marly’s original Russian version — which Kessel could read perfectly well — the two men and the young woman set about writing French lyrics.

The manuscript of the song was composed at a table in a Surrey inn, the Ashdown Park Hotel at Coulsdon South, on 23 May 1943, and performed for the first time that same evening, back in London, at the home of Louba Krassine, Emmanuel d’Astier de la Vigerie’s companion.

A week later, on 30 May 1943, “Le Chant des partisans” as we know it today was recorded by Germaine Sablon, for the soundtrack of Three Songs about Resistance, a propaganda film featuring, as its title indicates, three songs about resistance. Its director, Alberto Cavalcanti, gave a slightly different chronology: “One Sunday in May, Germaine Sablon telephoned me from Coulsdon South, near London, to say that she had finally managed to get Joseph Kessel and Maurice Druon to write the words that afternoon, and we arranged to meet the next day at Ealing Studios. Indeed, Germaine Sablon, accompanied by Kessel, brought me the lyrics set to Anna Marly’s music. Germaine Sablon, with the studio’s arranger, worked out the accompaniment, and by the end of the week the film was finished. That is how Germaine Sablon created Le Chant des Partisans.” (Cavalcanti, in Revue de la France libre, no. 153, November–December 1964).

On that same 30 May 1943, Charles de Gaulle, head of Free France, arrived in the greatest secrecy in Algiers to found the Comité de libération nationale, merging the Comité national français of London, which he led, with the Commandement en chef français civil et militaire of Algiers, led by General Giraud, in order to unify the French war effort and prepare for the Liberation. Emmanuel d’Astier de la Vigerie would be appointed Commissioner of the Interior in November. In the meantime, he had ensured that “Le Chant des partisans” crossed the Channel: on 24 September 1943, its words were printed clandestinely in occupied France, in Auch, in the first issue of the Cahiers de la Libération. Since few people had access to this underground review, d’Astier de la Vigerie had a leaflet printed with the lyrics, intended to be dropped by the Royal Air Force over French territory. To give the impression that the song originated in the maquis — a term denoting both a group of resistance fighters and the terrain in which they operated during the Second World War — the two-leaf sheet bears the words “created in the Maquis and broadcast on English radio by the B.B.C.” It is even possible that this leaflet predates the “official” appearance of the Cahiers de la Libération, a copy of which accompanies this item. Unlike the French edition, its title is “Les Partisans,” without the subtitle “Chant de la libération.” The text was reprinted in October in London by Maurice Druon, then in a November issue of the Courrier de l’Air dropped over occupied France — where the transcription contained an error (“C’est l’arme” instead of “C’est l’alarme”) — and finally in an issue of the review Fontaine, under the direction of Max-Pol Fouchet, on 25 December 1943.

We have not been able to trace a single institutional copy of this booklet, which is notably absent from the collections of the Bibliothèque nationale, the Musée national de la Résistance and the Musée de l’Armée at the Hôtel national des Invalides.

We know of only one other copy, in a private collection.

While the anthem spread, Kessel devoted himself full-time to finishing the work he had begun since his arrival: a tribute to the Resistance drawn from the testimonies of d’Astier, Colonel Rémy and other members of the Resistance he had met in Free French circles in London. Completed in September 1943, his “long version” of the Chant des partisans, L’Armée des ombres, was published in Algiers by Edmond Charlot.