How pretty is this song by Michel Delpech, as beautiful as Marianne, a symbolic figure of the French Republic. In 3 minutes and a half, Pierre Papadiamandis for the music and Michel Delpech for the lyrics paint the history of the republicstill in danger, Parisian revolutions, the great one of 1789, the monarchy of July 1830, the second republic in 1848, the commune of 1870 and May 68.
Michel Delpech was born in Courbevoie, stay-at-home mom, metallurgist father, he is not from the seraglio at all but he has a passion for writing and journalism. His songs look like news items. For “Marianne was pretty”, her inspiration comes from a film clip by Sacha Guitry “If Versailles was told to me”…
1789 is the revolution. The wrathful and hungry little people of Paris rush to the Palace of Versailles and Edith Piaf, in the film, sings the famous “It will go”.
Unmissable hit in Delpech’s career “That Marianne was pretty” is a real plea for France. Triumphant tours follow one another all over the world: Italy, Spain, Germany, Russia and Japan, with always, for Michel, the happiness of returning to Paris and singing his pretty Marianne and even in unlikely places like the carousel of the Republican Guard in the Célestins district during an Yves Mourousi broadcast.
From the first bars of the chorus “God but that Marianne was pretty”, Michel Delpech takes us on a a wild romantic rideclinging to the gates of the Palace of Versailles, on a barricade of the three glorious ones, where nose to the wind of spring, Gavroche sings the praises of Voltaire and Rousseau, a Marianne of a popular singer who counts in the history of Paris at the same title as Delacroix’s painting “Liberty Leading the People”.