La Marseillaise

La Marseillaise is a recurring national symbol in the novel’s scenes of public celebration, but its meaning shifts with the setting. Sung imperfectly from an apartment or loudly by workers at lunch, it can suggest shared belonging while also becoming a vehicle for teasing, improvisation, and social commentary.

A national emblem in a shared spectacle

On July 14, the town gathers beneath fireworks organized by City Hall. The display draws a thousand faces toward the sky, and even Stéphanie and Clémence abandon their usual detachment to watch. The scene establishes the scale of the public ritual around the national holiday: the crowd, the lights, and the shared attention make belonging briefly visible before the anthem itself is heard elsewhere in the novel.

The football celebrations offer a related but distinct image of national togetherness. When France scores against Croatia, the bar erupts; after the victory, Heillange fills with honking cars, flags, firecrackers, and people greeting one another. The celebration is described as a moment when the crowd feels joined in a common fate, as if history and old debts had temporarily fallen away. This ecstatic unity is not the same as a performance of La Marseillaise, but it helps explain the powerful national feeling the song can summon.

An incomplete rendition from above

After the match, as Anthony and Hacine are talking outside L’Usine, a woman begins singing La Marseillaise in an apartment overhead. She sings on key, but appears not to know the lyrics well: her rendition stops after the line about impure blood watering the fields. The anthem enters the scene not through an official ceremony or a formal chorus, but as a private voice spilling into the street during a night of celebration.

The interruption gives the song an everyday, imperfect presence. Its familiar patriotic force remains recognizable, yet the performance is partial rather than authoritative. In the aftermath of a victory that has briefly made strangers feel like a single crowd, the song comes from one neighbor above, linking public excitement to ordinary life without making the two identical.

Workplace singing as play and provocation

At the factory canteen, La Marseillaise becomes a collective performance with a different tone. With France’s final approaching, workers pool their wine tickets and buy every available bottle. Karim climbs onto a chair and starts the anthem; the workers join in, making an uproar that the narration characterizes as fooling around under the guise of patriotism.

The singing is both communal and deliberately unserious. The workers use the language and sound of national devotion to enjoy themselves and needle the executives dining apart from them. The moment turns a national emblem into a brief workplace performance, where solidarity among workers and mockery of the hierarchy coexist. Anthony, by contrast, does not sing or touch his wine. He eats quickly, and the chocolate dessert recalls meals shared with his parents, drawing private family memory into the same lunch hour as the workers’ noisy anticipation of the final.

Unity and its limits

The song’s contrasting appearances sit beside a football celebration that seems, for a moment, to erase social distinctions. In the bar, Anthony and Hacine—whose relationship has been marked by conflict—join the same outburst of joy after Lilian Thuram scores. The account presents the resulting national unity as intense but fantastical: everyone caught up in it seems to answer to the same rhythm, while whatever remains outside becomes difficult to comprehend.

The town’s celebrations also show that national belonging is not represented by a single, uncontested symbol. French flags fill the streets, but Algerian flags appear as well; meanwhile, the local National Front office has shut its iron shutter. Read alongside the partial apartment rendition and the workers’ playful chorus, La Marseillaise is less a settled statement of consensus than a flexible emblem: it can accompany a crowd’s exhilaration, sound from a neighbor’s home, or be taken up to expose the comic distance between patriotic display and everyday social divisions.