Michel Sardou is not one of my favorite French singers. I prefer Bernard Lavilliers, Francis Cabrel, Julien Clerc, Yves Duteil, Renaud and Michel Fugain, to name only the living.
However, I am forced to note that Sardou, as soon as he makes his big, powerful voice heard, is impressive. I will love you, his immense success of 1976, it tears apart, as the French say, although, from another point of view, it can also attack if, as is my case, we do not clearly see what the Marquis de Sade in a love song. Sardou, that’s it: a singer of fierce charm.
I must have been 14 when I first listened to it seriously. I already knew his hits Singing (1978) and There love sickness (1973), which played often and everywhere, but I really got hooked when I heard him sing, in a Quebec variety show, If we come back less rich (1983).
I was a teenager, I dreamed of a fairer world, attached to art and life rather than money. I recognized this calling in this song. Being less rich, I heard, we don’t care, since living on love and fresh water is better.
I understood my mistake years later when I looked at the text of the song. Sardou, basically, who is an unrepentant nouveau riche, sings a bourgeois invitation to travel, which I have nothing to do with. Still, I had discovered a voice. Music, because it speaks to the heart, has its reasons that reason does not know.
I was nevertheless surprised to learn that a French publisher specializing in history was devoting a book to Sardou. Was there much to say, especially from a historical point of view, about a singer who is still alive and who has not changed the face of the world? The memory of my teenage emotion made me want to go and see.
In Michel Sardou. Truths and legends (Perrin, 2023, 192 pages), Florent Barraco, journalist at Figaro, highlights a controversial Sardou who has often been involved in French social debates for half a century. In Quebec, the singer appears as a chic variety artist. In France, left-wing activists consider him an undrinkable, even dangerous, reactionary. Sardou, it must be said, is a loud mouth who does not hate provocation.
In 1976, inspired by a true story, he wrote I am for, a song in which the father of a cowardly murdered little boy says he is in favor of the death penalty for the murderer. The work sparked a huge controversy. Sardou, who already had a reputation as a misogynist and homophobe, is now suspected of fascism by the most militant left.
In 1978, the linguist Louis-Jean Calvet and the musicologist Jean-Claude Klein published Should we burn Sardou?, an essay in which they denounce the singer’s right-wing and irresponsible ideology. The latter, however, received the support of left-wing artists like Yves Montand, Jean Ferrat and Maxime Le Forestier.
Sardou no longer sings I am for since a long time. The song, however, is nothing scandalous. By putting ourselves in the shoes of a father whose little one has just been murdered, we can understand, without buying into it, the desire for revenge. If art does not allow such emotions, what is the point?
The comment also applies to the song Cities of solitude (1973), in which a drunk and idle man, wandering in an urban desert, has fantasies of violence and rape, which he fortunately ends up repressing. It’s psychoanalysis in song. Taken literally and in pieces, the work is intolerable, but it is precisely because it seeks to express the dangers of modern involuntary solitude.
Although he is in his early thirties, Barraco does not hide his admiration for the 77-year-old singer. It is true, he admits, that Sardou, “slightly macho, largely boastful, not very keen on sharing household chores”, is not in tune with the times and leans to the right.
He calls himself a Gaullist, supported Giscard in 1974, Chirac in 1995 and Sarkozy in 2007, before saying he was disappointed. He has always, moreover, admired Mitterrand and even recognized qualities in Mélenchon before demonizing him. Nor will we find on the far right anyone who claims that Zemmour and Le Pen are only talking bullshit.
In politics, Sardou, as they say in France, clashes with everyone and also says a lot of stupid things. “It is rather,” summarizes Barraco, “an individualist “anar”, therefore right-wing, who mocks conventions and institutions. »
I wouldn’t want such a man as a friend. That doesn’t stop me from being moved when I hear him sing A girl with light eyes (1974) or that I find his songs in the film The Aries family (2014). I like it softer than hard.
Columnist (Presence Info, Game), essayist and poet, Louis Cornellier teaches literature at college.