Rejecting flag with hatchet | John Philip Sousa & Jeanne Hachette
John Philip Sousa, the 19th century March King, celebrated flags, such as his “Stars and Stripes Forever.” Jeanne Fourquet, a 15th century French peasant, is honored for desecrating a flag. How they came together at the White House makes for an interesting trek through history.
At the beginning of the Civil War, a newspaper in New Orleans, a city known for its French connections, told readers that “history abounds in examples of courage and heroism in the weaker sex.” The article cited France’s Joan of Arc and then observed that “everyone knows the history of Jeanne Hachette.”
That’s hardly true in the 21st century. As the Louisiana paper explained, “the city of Beauvais [France], besieged and assaulted by the enemy, was on the point of being captured [in 1472]….Jeanne Hachette rushed to the ramparts, at the head of a number of women, snatched the enemy’s flag from the wall and felled into the moat the soldier who had hoisted it there.”
In 1899, The New York Times re-told the heroic moment in present tense: “A shout is heard: a Burgundian had planted a flag on the rampart, but almost at the same moment is raised a cry of terror. The soldier…rolls down on his comrades, head cleft in twain. And by whom? By the prettiest girl in town.”
Using such language to describe an adult who performed a heroic deed is archaic now, but it saluted a woman who risked her life for her country. Jeanne Fourquet lived in obscurity until she was 18 and the siege of her town began.
The Brooklyn Eagle, in 1931, recounted that she rallied other women to defend their town by crying, “To arms! To arms!” Inside the castle, she saw the enemy soldier place his banner and “threw the man from the wall into the moat below.”
Jeanne Fourquet is now known by another name. Because she wielded a battle axe, she became celebrated as Jeanne the Hatchet or, in French, Jeanne Hachette.
In late September 1887, the last Marine Band concert of the summer, conducted by Sousa, was held on the White House lawn. Featured among the selections was “Jeanne Hachette” by Italian composer Giuseppe Concone. The lyrics begin: “Ye women of Beauvais, brave heroines exalted, shall we now ‘neath the Conquerors’ yoke submissive bend?”
Thus did history’s twists unite Sousa and Hachette at the White House.