Claude Joseph Rouget de Lisle Claude Joseph Rouget de Lisle Claude Joseph Rouget de Lisle (), sometimes spelled de l'Isle or de Lile (10 May 1760 – 26 June 1836), was a French army officer of the French Revolutionary Wars. He is known for writing the words and music of the "Chant de guerre pour l'armée du Rhin" in 1792, which would later be known as "La Marseillaise" and become the French national anthem. Rouget de Lisle was born at Lons-le-Saunier, reputedly on a market day. His parents lived in the neighbouring village of Montaigu. A plaque was placed at the precise spot of his
Emile Armet de Lisle de Lisle focused his studies on chemistry, and eventually he returned to work under his father in the family quinine business. For some time, Armet de Lisle worked as a consultant for Marie and Pierre Curie. The Curies had developed a method for extracting radium compounds from pitchblende (a radioactive ore), but the outlook of the procedure, called "fractional crystallization," was poor. Even with an abundance of pitchblende, only very minute amounts of usable radium could realistically be harvested through the tedious procedure. In 1904, de Lisle, realizing that such a process would likely benefit considerably from an industrial scale-up