Claude Joseph Rouget de Lisle

Claude Joseph Rouget de Lisle was a French army officer during the Revolutionary Wars, a soldier in the middle of the turmoil that redrew Europe. Somewhere in that chaos he sat down and wrote La Marseillaise, the song that would rally the revolutionaries and outlive every regime that followed. It became the French national anthem, the one piece of the revolution that never fell out of favor. He lived until 1836, decades past the barricades, carrying the strange distinction of having authored a nation's voice in a single stroke.