A France in Turmoil Mourns Françoise Hardy, Its Voice of Melancholy Cool

 

A France in Turmoil Mourns Françoise Hardy, Its Voice of Melancholy Cool

 

An overwhelming outpouring of tributes felt like a quest for some anchor in shared memory.

 

Roger Cohen

By Roger Cohen

Reporting from Paris

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/14/world/europe/france-francoise-hardy-tributes.html

June 14, 2024, 9:05 a.m. ET

 

It was like Françoise Hardy, the wistful singer and songwriter of a certain French melancholy and style, to slip away in the midst of a political storm, for it was never the clamor of power struggles that interested her, but rather an inner world of solitude, love betrayed and loss.

 

With France in turmoil after President Emmanuel Macron’s sudden plunging of the nation into an unexpected legislative election campaign, the country’s leading newspapers nevertheless devoted much of their front pages to Ms. Hardy’s death this week at the age of 80, hailing “the icon” of French music.

 

For Gabriel Attal, the prime minister, it was the loss of “this singular voice of a fierce tranquillity that cradled generations of French people” that felt overwhelming. For Brigitte Bardot, “France has lost with her a little of that nobility, of that beauty and that luminous talent, of that elegance that she conveyed all through her life.”

 

It was as if the country through Ms. Hardy’s life had come full circle, from her birth during an air raid in Nazi-occupied Paris in 1944, seven months before the city’s liberation, to a moment when a far-right party once led by a man who belittled the Holocaust is now possibly on the brink of power.

 

The Nouvel Obs magazine caught a general atmosphere of disorientation in the country as it wrote of Ms. Hardy “wandering the road of lost hearts” at the “end of the summer, the end of the afternoon.” It continued: “As you are leaving on a voyage, how to say goodbye to you?”

 

This was a play on her 1968 hit “Comment Te Dire Adieu?” (“How Can I Say Goodbye to You?”), a riff also reprised by Mr. Macron in a tribute to her. The real question that hovered in the air seemed to be: What might France be saying goodbye to?

 

A snap election called by Mr. Macron after a heavy defeat to Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Rally in European Parliament election could lead to her emerging as the dominant force in the National Assembly, which might in turn oblige Mr. Macron to break a taboo of the Fifth Republic by naming a prime minister from Ms. Le Pen’s party in early July.

 

Ms. Hardy, distinguished by the knowing look in her glittering eyes and a delivery that was often deadpan and borderline detached, never had any illusions about life’s bitter surprises. She grew up with a single mother; her father was married to another woman. Success intrigued her but never bewitched her, as she retained a reserve and fragility that was part of her fascination.

 

Chic, willowy, elegant and tantalizingly elusive, she burst on the scene at the age of 18 with her 1962 hit “Tous les Garçons et les Filles” (“All the Boys and Girls”), which went on to sell 2.5 million copies and landed her on the cover of Paris Match in early 1963.

 

Of a breathtaking lyrical simplicity, with a minimalist guitar accompaniment, the song told of a young woman’s loneliness watching young couples “their eyes in their eyes, hand in hand” walking heedlessly toward their tomorrows as she suffered and pined.

 

If ever there was proof that some things just sound better in French, this song provided it. “Les yeux dans les yeux, la main dans la main” is translatable as above, but only at great cost.

 

Bob Dylan was entranced; Mick Jagger was fascinated. The world beckoned. So, too, did movie roles. She toured widely. Fashion designers and great photographers dedicated themselves to capturing her reticent, teasing beauty. In 1968 she appeared in a golden metal minidress by the Spanish designer Paco Rabanne that, like so much in her life, summoned the word “iconic.”

 

Yet, to the last, Ms. Hardy trod a lonesome road. Passion was possessive, she came to believe, and so inevitably destructive. In her 2004 song “Le Jardinier Bénévole” (“The Volunteer Gardener”) she wrote, “I’ll open my arms wide so you can take flight,” words that caught her view of the deeper love found in maturity.

 

She once said, “The melodies that move me most, that are the most beautiful, inevitably have an element of melancholy that links us to the divine.”

 

Her 1981 marriage to the singer and songwriter Jacques Dutronc was marked, she observed, by more absence than presence, yet through all the pain evident in many songs, they never divorced and remained on good terms.

 

It was perhaps her 1973 song “Message Personnel” (“Personal Message”), written the same year as the birth of her son Thomas Dutronc, that reached most deeply into her loneliness, contradictions, dignity and elusive search for love:

 

I am afraid you are deaf

I am afraid you may be a coward

I am afraid to be indiscreet

I cannot tell you I love you perhaps

But if one day you think you love me

Do not think your memories disturb me

And run, run until you are out of breath

Come and find me again.

 

A France on the brink lost some essence of itself with Ms. Hardy’s dignified disappearance and in the overwhelming outpouring of tributes to her seemed to be searching across acute division for some anchor in shared memory.

 

Roger Cohen is the Paris Bureau chief for The Times, covering France and beyond. He has reported on wars in Lebanon, Bosnia and Ukraine, and between Israel and Gaza, in more than four decades as a journalist. At The Times, he has been a correspondent, foreign editor and columnist. More about Roger Cohen