PARIS — Last November, immediately after the Bataclan terror attacks here, France’s national anthem took on a global significance that few would have predicted. “La Marseillaise” was sung at rallies across the country, in English soccer stadiums and American concert halls.

But it was actually a song transformed — throwing off its appropriation by the far right to become an anthem of unity and hope. That change had begun to occur after the earlier Charlie Hebdo attack — something noted by President François Hollande, who named 2016 the Year of the “Marseillaise.”

This month, about 100 academics, government officials and military personnel gathered at a daylong conference at the French Defense Ministry to help mark an end to that commemoration. They debated the song’s meaning, especially its climax that calls on people to “water the fields with impure blood” (the debate was over whose blood it was). They discussed how its melody had inspired revolutionaries from Russia to Chile. And they listened to countless versions of it, a feminist “Marseillaise” going down particularly well (its chorus — “Tremble, tremble, jealous husbands” — was met with laughter).

Jean-Marc Todeschini, who is responsible for veteran affairs at the Defense Ministry, said that the Year of the Marseillaise was declared precisely so that the French, especially the young, could re-appropriate the republican values of the song, which was written by Claude Joseph Rouget de Lisle in 1792 during the French Revolution.