La Marseillaise

La Marseillaise functions in U.S.A. less as a decorative song reference than as a recurring political sound: it carries the demand for peace and freedom from revolutionary crowds into the novel’s account of American reform, and ultimately into a fragmented collage of headlines and lyrics. Its meaning changes with each appearance. The song can signal collective hope, but its return also measures the distance between that hope and the compromised movements or institutions that claim to answer it.

Lyrics and textual form

One appearance gives the song through its French opening, “Allons enfants de la patrie” and “Lejour de gloire est arrive.” The second phrase appears in the source as a continuous word and without an accent; retaining that printed form matters because this is not a continuous performance or a full translation, but a brief textual shard. Set among a headline about women mobbing a crown prince and other popular song lyrics, the lines become one element in a fast-moving public collage rather than a self-contained musical scene.

That placement suits the form of the Newsreels, which interrupt the narrative with newspaper headlines, fragments of news, advertising slogans, and song lyrics. Such scraps illuminate the surrounding American landscape in sudden, garish flashes. La Marseillaise enters this form as a recognizable French-language fragment, yet the novel does not pause to explain it or settle its significance. The reader encounters it amid competing snippets of public life, where political feeling is carried by fragments as much as by sustained argument.

A revolutionary sound in Russia

The song’s most charged political association appears in the passage concerning Paxton Hibben. Amid the violence around the Winter Palace, Hibben sees machine guns on balconies and Cossacks charging unarmed crowds who want peace, food, and a little freedom. He hears what the narrative calls the throaty roar of the Russian Marseillaise. The song is thus bound to a crowd’s audible presence: it is not simply a private memory or an emblem displayed at a distance, but part of a mass expression of resistance under attack.

The sound changes Hibben’s relation to his diplomatic post. Something in him rebels; he walks the streets all night with revolutionaries and gets into trouble at the embassy. The consequences are practical as well as political: he is transferred to Mexico City, where the passage contrasts the absence of revolution with the stillness of peons and priests and the great volcanoes. The song’s association with collective upheaval therefore travels with Hibben even when the institution moves him away from it. His subsequent work at The Hague, where he falls asleep during the International Tribunal’s vague deliberations, sharpens the contrast between revolutionary urgency and official procedure.

From American reform to international chorus

In 1912, Hibben resigns from the Diplomatic Service and returns home to campaign for Theodore Roosevelt. At the Chicago convention, he hears “Onward Christian Soldiers” sung by a packed crowd. Yet the hymn’s sound calls up other political memories: the Russian Marseillaise, the sullen silence of Mexican peons, Colombian Indians waiting for a deliverer, and the cadences of the Declaration of Independence. The passage makes the convention’s crowd an acoustic junction, where American political language is heard alongside remembered revolutionary sound and the muted presence of people still awaiting justice.

That convergence does not amount to confidence in Roosevelt’s movement. The talk of social justice fades; Hibben concludes that Theodore Roosevelt is a windbag and that the Bull Moose Party is stuffed with the same sawdust as the Republican Party. He then runs for Congress as a progressive in Indiana, but the European war has already drawn people’s attention away from social justice. La Marseillaise consequently marks not a successful transfer of revolutionary promise into American politics, but the pressure of that promise against a campaign and a political moment that cannot sustain it.

Repetition without resolution

A later passage gathers the Marseillaise of 1905, the 1912 hymn, the passiveness of American Indians, and infantrymen waiting for death at the front into the tremendous roar of The Internationale. Hibben believes in the new world, but the passage’s accumulating sounds are not identical experiences: a revolutionary song, a Christian hymn, silence, and soldiers’ waiting remain distinct even as the narrative makes them converge. The recurring melody becomes a means of hearing political history across borders and periods, not proof that those histories have reached a common resolution.

This recurrence accords with U.S.A.’s larger construction, in which individual life narratives are interrupted and reframed by Newsreels, brief biographies, and the Camera Eye. Instead of using a conventional plot to reconcile the lives and historical forces it presents, the novel places fragments beside one another and lets their collisions make meaning. La Marseillaise contributes a particularly vivid thread to that design: first the sound of a crowd demanding peace, food, and freedom; then a memory that unsettles American political ceremony; and finally one voice in an international chorus whose hope remains audible, but unresolved.