Counterrevolutionary Aristocrats in Exile
The revolution in France was a rebellion not only against absolute monarchy, but also against feudal privileges for the aristocracy. After the fall of the Bastille in 1789, some French nobles fled the country and formed a counterrevolutionary group in exile. In one of the film's best sequences, Renoir gives us his version of the life being led by a few of these émigrés.
In a hotel in Coblenz, Germany, French aristocrats idle away the hours and yearn for the day they can return to their homeland. They begin to discuss politics, and it emerges that they are allied with the Prussians, who are planning to soon invade France with an army led by the Duke of Brunswick. But the political discussion is suspended when a more pressing issue is raised, namely recalling exactly how they used to move when dancing the third figure of the gavotte at Versailles.
Foreign Threat to the French Revolution
During the time period covered in the last three-quarters of the film, Austria and Prussia were at war with France. In the movie, the commander of the Austrian and Prussian armies issues a document called the Brunswick Manifesto warning that if Tuileries Palace is broken into, a terrible vengeance will be carried out against Paris. The manifesto was pivotal in the French Revolution because it made it difficult to resist the conclusion that Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette were more closely aligned with foreign aristocrats than with the French public. Renoir shows this in an amusing way: two men of the Marseilles battalion take their girlfriends to a Paris shadow theater where they watch a show dramatizing the estrangement of the nation from the king because of the Brunswick Manifesto.
Taking the Brunswick Manifesto to be final proof that Louis XVI was collaborating with France's enemies, the revolutionaries attacked Tuileries Palace on August 10, 1792. Renoir makes this battle the climax of the film and shows both sides suffering casualties. But the revolutionaries triumph and imprison the royal family, putting an end to the monarchy.
However, there remained a major obstacle to the revolution, and Renoir deals with that in a brief epilogue. The Austrian and Prussian armies invaded France, so the film shows the French forces, including the Marseilles battalion, marching off to confront the foreigners at a place named Valmy. Text appears on the screen informing us that the invaders were defeated, and thus a new era began.
On DVD, Part of the Jean Renoir Collector's Edition
For many years it has been difficult to see La Marseillaise in North America, but that changed on April 24, 2007, when Lionsgate released it on DVD as one of the films in the three-disc Jean Renoir Collector's Edition box set. The run time for La Marseillaise is 2 hours 12 minutes. The other movies included in the set are La Fille de l'eau (1925), Nana (1926), Sur un air de Charleston (1927), La Petite marchande d'allumettes (1928), Le Testament du Docteur Cordelier (1959) and Le Caporal épinglé (1962). All the films are in French with English subtitles available. The DVD set also contains a 32-minute documentary where Martin Scorsese and three experts talk in English about the seven movies. In the documentary, Scorsese says about La Marseillaise that he considers it "one of the finest and richest historical films ever made."
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