As a call to arms, few national hymns are as bloody as La Marseillaise. Originally entitled the War Song of the Army of the Rhine, it exhorts citizens of France to take up arms: “Form in batallions, March, march! Let impure blood water our furrows!'' Now, after a 10-year battle, French schoolchildren are to be made to learn the words after a vote by French MPs. The idea is to “transmit to each and every pupil the history of a people united around the values of liberty, equality and fraternity — the history of a people who have never stopped...