> the violence directed towards the French by the various coalitions arrayed against it at that time I’m not extremely deeply familiar with the history and con

> the violence directed towards the French by the various coalitions arrayed against it at that time I’m not extremely deeply familiar with the history and consequences of the French Revolution, but I recall that it was the French who started the War of the First Coalition. As an ironic aside, it looks like the fellow who commissioned La Marseillaise lost his head to the Reign of Terror. > contrast that to the dueling German anthem in the film, which is a rather explicitly anti-French anthem Die Wacht am Rhein? The lyrics on Wikipedia don’t mention the French at all so far as I can tell. They claim that ‘Frenchman’ is a literal translation of ‘Welscher,’ but I think the literal translation is ‘foreigner.’