France says goodbye to Françoise Hardy

(Paris) Time for farewells: relatives and hundreds of admirers of French singer Françoise Hardy mourned Thursday at the Père-Lachaise cemetery in Paris, one of the last icons of sixtiesdied at age 80.

The singer and songwriter Jacques Dutronc, husband of Françoise Hardy from whom she had been separated for years, and their son, also a singer, Thomas Dutronc, were surrounded by the artistic family of Françoise Hardy, who did not want a religious ceremony .

A whole generation of French song was there: Julien Clerc, Laurent Voulzy, Dave, as well as Sheila and Salvatore Adamo, greatly applauded as they entered the dome of the Père-Lachaise crematorium. As well as the director François Ozon, who used several of the singer’s tunes in his films, and the faithful Étienne Daho.

The artist, with his androgynous physique and assumed melancholy, conquered the Anglo-Saxon public in the 1960s, catching the eye of Mick Jagger and Bob Dylan. She was also the only Frenchwoman in the ranking of the 200 best singers of all time published by the American magazine Rolling Stone in 2023.

The half-hour ceremony took place in privacy. The singer’s greatest hits resonated in the square, where hundreds of admirers were gathered, murmuring the words with reddened eyes.

All the boys and girls –– which she had written and composed, sold more than two million copies – or How to say goodbye to youhis 1968 standard, rocked the adolescence of many of his fans.

On Thursday, former President Nicolas Sarkozy and his wife Carla attended the ceremony at Père-Lachaise, as did the Minister of Culture Rachida Dati and the wife of the French head of state, Brigitte Macron, who was booed , noted an AFP journalist.

It’s certain Personal message (“if you ever believe that you love me…”) that the light wooden coffin has left the scene.

“She has marked our lives, from the 1960s to today,” Jean-Charles, a 70-year-old Parisian retiree with a Basque beret on his head, told AFP. “With his texts, we could take the time to settle down and live.”

“She represents all of my youth, she was a discreet personality, far from the buzza very beautiful woman compared to today’s bimbos,” says Houria, a 71-year-old Parisian.

The singer of So many beautiful things had expressed the wish to be “cremated in privacy and without religious ceremony”, according to the weekly Paris Matchand buried in Corsica, more precisely at Monticello, where Jacques Dutronc lives.

The disappearance of Françoise Hardy, who had fought against cancer which appeared in 2004, comes almost a year after that of the French’s favorite Englishwoman, Jane Birkin, another emblematic figure of the sixties who died in July 2023.