Le Regiment de Sambre-et-Meuse - - the march better known as French National Defile...

Sambre-et-Meuse was a department of the First French Empire named for the Sambre and Meuse Rivers. The capital of the department was Namur. Today the region is part of Belgium and Namur is the capital of the Belgian province of Namur. In the 1640s, the Spanish Netherlands had acquired the area. Louis XIV invaded the area in 1692 and claimed it for France. Three years later, in 1695, William III of Orange-Nassau claimed the area in the War of the Grand Alliance. Under the Barrier Treaty of 1709 the Netherlands gained the right to set up troops in Namur. However, the Treaty of Utrecht of 1713 gave the control of areas formerly under control of the Spanish Netherlands gave power to the Austrian House of Habsburg. It was an Austrian region protected by Dutch troops. In November 1792, the French began acquisition of the area. The 3,000 soldiers stationed at Namur became prisoners of war and France claimed this as a department in 1794. It remained a part of France until 1815, after Napoleon's defeat. The Congress of Vienna (Austria still claimed this territory) began sectioning off what is now Belgium into the Netherlands at this time. In 1830, Belgium had its own revolution and declared independence from the Netherlands. There is so much more history after that, but we are mainly interested in the story behind the march we know as the FRENCH NATIONAL DEFILE. (Notice how the area doesn't seem so French.)
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So, to reiterate: The department of Sambre-et-Meuse existed from 1795 to 1815 (Napoleon's defeat was actually the year before). Namur was the capital. The department was split into four arrondissements which were further split into 4-6 cantons each. The area has been considered Belgian since 1815. As said there's a lot more history, but we need to remember this is a French march.
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Le Régiment de Sambre-et-Meuse was a poem written by Paul Cezano in 1870 as France was getting ready for the Franco-Prussian War and the country was beginning its Third French Republic. The idea of the poet was to recall the bravery of those soldiers back eighty-some years before. In time, music was added. J. Robert Planquette (1846-1903) was a composer of art songs and light operas and was popular in both France and the United Kingdom. The song was composed in 1871. In 1879, Joseph François Rauski (1837-1910) wrote an arrangement of the song into a military march. (In my humble opinion, Cezano, Planquette, and Rauski should all get credit for composing the march.)

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Now for some real confusion: The U.S. version of the march called French National Defile isn't technically the same piece as the march I have been talking about. It was composed by Andre Turlet in 1908 as a commission by the New York publisher, Carl Fischer. I have seen no biography for Mr. Turlet. A friend of mine who retired from the main Carl Fischer outlet in New York told me there was talk among the employees that Turlet was actually Louis-Philippe Laurendeau (1861-1916), an employee of Carl Fischer who was actually quite a decent composer and arranger. He is most famous for introducing the march Entry of the Gladiators by Julius Fučík (1872-1916), which Laurendeau (known as Phil to his Carl Fischer colleagues) renamed "Thunder and Blazes," a name that stuck with that march for the past 116 years. Although born in Quebec, Phil Laurendeau spoke with what was called a "typical Toronto accent." Because of this, Phil came up with a "safety alias," George H. Reeves, a name which he used for writing educational materials. Although he died long before many good public, private, and parochial schools were able to develop really successful instrumental music programs, Phil Laurendeau had a dream that there would come a time when learning how to play a band or orchestra instrument would be done in schools as good as or better than any private musical academy. Anyway, this all shows the background of the man I would guess would have written the American version of the French National Defile, of which I am sure if anything else, he came up with the title. The march is an arrangement of Planquette's march using an early 20th century concert band instrumentation.  Since most of Carl Fischer's publications had relatively short copyright spans, later editions of some marches had additional editing (marked on the page as an arrangement). Later editions of French National Defile are marked "arranged by Julius S. Seredy." Seredy (1874-1946) was another Carl Fischer employee although he didn't do very much in the way of original compositions. Basically, he was assigned band or solo works and corrected anything that looked like a mistake. If the copy looked clean, he would add some dynamic contrast that wasn't in the original.