French-language songs are enjoying unprecedented success in non-francophone countries thanks to artists like Stromae, Aya Nakamura, Celine Dion and Edith Piaf. What makes people who don’t speak the language want to listen to them and what do they tell of France and its language? The new International Centre of the French Language outside Paris asks that intriguing question in its opening exhibition.
The Paris Olympics didn’t just showcase sporting prowess and monuments, they also gave huge exposure to songs in French.
Celine Dion arguably stole the opening ceremony with a monumental rendition of Edith Piaf's L'Hymne à l'amour from the top of the Eiffel Tower. Within 24 hours, streamings of the song worldwide were up by more than 300 percent.
Online streaming platforms have helped bring songs in French to new audiences, breaking the language barrier with translations at the ready. French-Malian star Aya Nakamura, who also contributed a memorable performance to the Olympic opener, is now the most streamed French-speaking artist ever.
Nakamura, Dion and Piaf, but also Juliette Gréco, Françoise Hardy, Zaz and many other female artists take centre stage at the exhibition “C’est une chanson qui nous ressemble” (“A song that resembles us”) that looks into the success of popular francophone songs around the world.
The title is taken from the classic Les Feuilles mortes (Autumn Leaves) by Jacques Prévert and Joseph Kosma.
“When you say ‘I love you’ and you’re not French it means something more, it means the Champs-Elysées, the Eiffel Tower, the Côte d’Azur, fields of lavender...” says the exhibition's curator, Bertrand Dicale.
“That’s the story we wanted to tell – the extent to which the French language, through song, carries with it realities, dreams, ambitions and illusions.”
Listen to an interview with Bertrand Dicale on the Spotlight on France podcast:
'Black Marie-Antoinette'
Music journalist Dicale is a walking encyclopedia on French song and when, in July 2023, he began thinking about which artists had made the most impact abroad, he realised they were primarily women.
“I drew up an initial list – Juliette Gréco, Aya Nakamura, Françoise Hardy, Edith Piaf, and of course the ‘Everest of French song’ Celine Dion, and then Françoise Hardy, Mireille Matthieu, Zaz… I had to get to 11th or 12th place to get the first man, Charles Aznavour.”
A life-size photo of Nakamura in figure-hugging, gold lamé dress opens the exhibition, alongside the video of her hit song Pookie, staged at the chateau of Fontainebleau.
Nakamura has broken through in more than 100 countries around the globe, Dicale explains.
And yet she faced a barrage of racism from the far right ahead of the Paris Olympics, after rumours circulated she would sing Piaf at the opening ceremony – as if she were “unworthy” of embodying French song. In the end she not only performed – alongside the Republican Guard – she redefined what it meant to be French.
“The far right and conservatives see her as an immigrant, therefore black... But seen from abroad, she is France," Dicale insists. "She's sexy, independent, she embodies freedom, beauty, glamour. She's seen as a kind of black Marie-Antoinette."
Exoticism and agony
Nakamura rubs shoulders with French icon Juliette Gréco, whom Dicale says experienced similar “love and hate” in her own era – the 1950s.
A photo of Gréco singing in Berlin shows her in a long, tight, black dress. While it covered everything but her hands and face, its body-hugging contours left nothing to the imagination.
Dicale says Gréco's untamed locks and free-woman attitude, combined with her ability to interpret philosophers like Jean-Paul Sartre, outraged conservative French society at the time. There was a sense of "shame", he notes, that she was representing France in Rio or Berlin. And yet she became a kind of "luxury export" – both cultivated and scandalous.
Remembering Juliette Gréco, Grand Dame of la chanson française
While both Nakamura and Gréco are shrouded in a certain eroticism, the term doesn't immediately spring to mind with that other French great, Edith Piaf.
The exhibition features a 1956 press cutting from the New York Times that refers to her as the high priestess of agony who "drenched Carnegie Hall in tears last night, and a large audience wallowed in them with an enthusiasm which proved that heartbreak makes the whole world kin".
Through songs like Les Amants d’un jour, about two lovers committing suicide together, Dicale says Piaf performed a kind of “theatre of suffering” – a genre not common in the US where ballads tended to be softer.
Politics in a male voice
While love features big time, non-francophone listeners are also drawn to songs in French for their message of freedom and resistance.
"The most popular and most recorded song in French worldwide is not La Vie en rose but La Marseillaise," says Dicale.
Recorded in hundreds of languages, "it's a song of revolution, the people’s revolution, a symbol of revolt by the people", he notes.
"But it's also a song of contradictions, sung both by those that took up arms against the French army and by members of the army as they were rifling protestors."
Most recordings have been made with male voices. That's also the case with L’Internationale – the song of communist revolt, composed in 1888 – and Le Boudin, the anthem of the French Foreign Legion.
“They're men’s songs and songs of the street,” says Dicale. “Politics is often carried by a male voice, even if [Eugène Delacroix's painting] Liberty Leading the People is a woman.”
Le Déserteur (The Deserter), another French-language hit abroad, bucks this trend somewhat. Written by Boris Vian, it was made famous in the US by Peter, Paul and Mary.
"They recorded it in French at the beginning of the Vietnam War and it remains one of the most famous pacifist songs in the world," Dicale notes.
The exhibition features a version in Russian recorded last year by France-based Ukrainian artist Diane Nelson, aimed at encouraging Russian soldiers in Ukraine to desert.
Oh, Champs-Elysées!
Of the 2,800 songs written about Paris, one of the most emblematic has to be the 1969 Joe Dassin hit Champs-Elysées.
The song celebrates the avenue where you can find “everything you want”, notably romance. But its origins are not French.
It was adapted from the 1968 British song Waterloo Road by obscure rock band Jason Crest, which celebrated a street in London where you might run across a “happy fella playing cakewalks on his guitar”.
The original was a flop. But French lyricist Pierre Delanoë heard the melody, liked it and gave it a more romantic twist, relocating it on an avenue where two strangers become lovers "dazzled by the long night".
The Champs-Elysées is now a soulless, overpriced boulevard, prompting local associations to campaign to help Parisians fall back in love with it.
But true to tradition, the song has allowed the dream to live on, long after reality took over.
The exhibition "C’est une chanson qui nous ressemble" runs at the Cité Internationale de la langue française at Chateau Villers-Cotterets until 5 January 2024.
More on this story on the Spotlight on France podcast, episode 117. Listen here.
