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# "Let their impure blood water our furrows": shall it flood our fields and orchards in an instant?
- URL: https://theparnassian.com/en/pust-krov-nechistaia-napolnit-nashi-rvy-propitaet-nashi-polia-nivy-i-sady-vmig-zalet/
- Published: 2020-08-27T09:30:15.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-01T05:42:20.000Z
- Author: Alexandr Radayev
- Tags: Education, Society, Paris

Some years ago a public debate flared up in France over the words of the republic's national symbol, the Marseillaise. Should children hear and sing words that preach cruelty, and in so crude a form, from their earliest years?

The debate naturally reveals the charm of the French attitude to their own history: tender, serious, and at the same time critical. In February 2019 Parliament voted on a bill on school education which contained, precisely, an amendment concerning the Marseillaise: the words of the anthem were to be displayed in all classes, beginning with the first stage, that is, in effect, in nursery school.

It must be said that many ministers of education have stumbled over the stone of the Marseillaise, especially where the youngest classes were concerned. Impure blood watering the earth: is it not a rather sharp phrase even for adult ears?

The opponents of having the Marseillaise sung by pre-schoolers and first-graders reasonably observe that bloodthirsty exhortations sit ill with the humanist values that are supposedly placed at the head of the corner in the republic's system of enlightenment. From the other side come questions such as: is one to be afraid of words? Must we throw cruelty out of our history?

Among the many arguments there are some quite judicious ones: for instance, why hang the words of the anthem in nursery schools if the children there cannot yet read? Someone objects that school already does too little to instil love of the fatherland, and that one might show not only the bright and pleasing pages of the past. And if pupils in the upper classes can be made to understand the cruelty of the refrain by being told not only of the values of the republic but also of the historical context, does the question of the little ones really remain open? Would you like your child to go about singing something like "whoever encroaches upon our freedom will find only a place in the grave in this world"? And that is mere child's play compared with the bloodthirstiness of the Marseillaise's refrain, which, if you please, refers back to the events of 1792.

If the idea of shedding the enemy's blood did not particularly trouble our ancestors, does it follow that we too must regard it with the same calm? And we are not even discussing the interpretation of the very notion of "impure blood", which in our present realities may acquire quite a different ring...