He replied to his critics that his version was closer to the original as the manuscript shows the words 'Aux armes et cætera.' for the chorus. Shortly afterward, Gainsbourg bought the original manuscript of 'La Marseillaise'. The soldiers joined them, a scene enjoyed by millions as French TV news broadcast it, creating more publicity. Alone onstage, Gainsbourg raised his fist and answered 'The true meaning of our national anthem is revolutionary' and sang it with the audience. In 1979, a show had to be cancelled, because an angry mob of French Army parachutists came to demonstrate in the audience. Following harsh and anti-semitic criticism in right-wing newspaper Le Figaro by Charles de Gaulle biographer Michel Droit, his song earned him death threats from right-wing veteran soldiers of the Algerian War of Independence, who were opposed to their national anthem being arranged in reggae style. In Jamaica in 1979, he recorded 'Aux Armes et cætera', a reggae version of the French national anthem 'La Marseillaise', with Robbie Shakespeare, Sly Dunbar and Rita Marley. Before he was 30 years old, Gainsbourg was a disillusioned painter but earned his living as a piano player in bars. Here Gainsbourg heard the accounts of Nazi persecution and genocide, stories that resonated for Gainsbourg far into the future. The school was set up under the auspices of local rabbis, for the orphaned children of murdered deportees. After the war, Gainsbourg obtained work teaching music and drawing in a school outside of Paris, in Le Mesnil-le-Roi. Limoges was in the Zone libre under the administration of the collaborationist Vichy government and still a perilous refuge for Jews. During the occupation, the Jewish Ginsburg family was able to make their way from Paris to Limoges, traveling under false papers. The identifying yellow star that Jews were required to wear haunted Gainsbourg in later years he was able to transmute this memory into creative inspiration. Gainsbourg's childhood was profoundly affected by the occupation of France by Germany during World War II.
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