[jcranmer]

> It is a patriotic military song about defending France from attackers. It's not fundamentally different from many other such verses in the anthems and patriotic texts of competing nations. The Quran contains similar wording when describing calls for Jihad to defend the fatherland.

But it is different. La Marseillaise isn't about how great France is, and why it's worth defending. It's about how our enemies are coming to rape, pillage, and murder everyone, and we need to fight to the end to prevent that from happening. It's also quite notable in that it doesn't specifically insult other countries or lay grandiose claims to land in its lyrics, which were quite common features in national anthems in the 1800s.

One should also point out that the song the Germans are singing is literally about how Germans need to stand on the Rhine to defend Germany from France--it antagonizes France both implicitly and explicitly. So in context, you have Germans singing about how they need to defend themselves from a country they've already defeated which is drowned out by the French singing about how they need to defend themselves from enemies come to destroy them (which, for them, had already happened).