The songs that Michel Berger and France Gall offered to France are in everyone’s mind. Behind their music, hides an emblematic couple but also full of pain. The melancholy of certain titles is all the stronger when one thinks of the ordeals crossed by the duo, such as the illness of their daughter Pauline.
Married to Michel Berger in 1976, the singer France Gall gave birth to Pauline, on November 14, 1978, the first child who precedes Raphaël, born in 1981. An immense joy for the couple which is then doubled by concern because the little girl is affected by cystic fibrosis. This rare and often fatal genetic disease affects the digestive and respiratory tracts, singer Grégory Lemarchal was also affected by this disease, dying in 2007.
After having faced the death by heart attack of Michel Berger in 1992, the interpreter of resist had to deal with the subsequent deterioration in the state of health of their daughter Pauline. She decided to retire from her career after her tour for the album France in 1996, in order to devote herself to her child. On December 15, 1997, Pauline died of complications from cystic fibrosis at just 19 years old. From this date, the artist then decided to withdraw from the public scene, settling in Senegal.
She gave off something other than the others
Pauline Berger had to learn to live with the disease, her family too. France Gall confided that she lost her recklessness when she learned that her daughter was sick. Paris Match revealed the funeral oration she had made for her child: “There isn’t, I mean not, a person who has met Pauline’s gaze, even furtively, who hasn’t stared at her for a few moments. She radiated something different from the others: she was not quite like the others. Me, I found it extraordinary but it was normal for me to think that.“
A legal battle to reunite father and daughter
Before dying, Pauline Hamburger – real surname of her father Michel Berger – had expressed a wish to her mother. In the book Something in us by Michel Berger of Yves Bigot, the producer Bernard Saint-Paul had revealed the last wishes of the daughter of France Gall and Michel Berger: “Little Pauline Hamburger who knows she is condemned, makes a will and says to her mother ‘I know I am going to die, I would like to be buried next to dad’.” Outside, the guardian of Michel Berger’s mother, Annette Haas, refuses, forcing the singer to embark on a legal battle. She will win her case and father and daughter will be reunited in the family vault at the Montmartre cemetery in Paris. In 2018, France Gall joined them, succumbing to cancer at the age of 70.
It is extraordinary to have known her for 19 years.
How do you survive the loss of your child? France Gall had shared her moving testimony in 2015 on D8, in a self-portrait by Eric Guéret: “I immediately wanted to be the most successful mother in the world to survive and integrate this idea of having lost a child. To be able, more easily, to live with that. Otherwise, we are screwed, if we think about it, if we are in regret. My way of thinking was, ‘It’s amazing to have known her for 19 years. They took it away from me, but they still gave it to me for 19 years.’ For Michel, that’s also what I thought.“