when Sardou’s song resurrected the abandoned liner on the quay of oblivion

Exactly fifty years ago, it was the first mass layoff of the Giscardian era, the beginning of the energy crisis… For all of French society, with the disarmament of the ocean liner France In October 1974, a page was turned.

An embarrassing witness to the end of the Trente Glorieuses, the France is relegated to oblivion, parked in an isolated canal. The people of Le Havre call the place “the quay of oblivion”. “It’s perfectly normal to disarm a ship because it’s no longer profitable. But to leave it like that, at the bottom of an industrial zone, lost, all alone… that’s not acceptable,” regrets the author-screenwriter Christian Clères. In this extract from “Affaires sensibles”, he sees in this relegation the side “dramatic, Shakespearean” from the history of France.

France would abandon the France ? That was without counting on a young singer who is used to outbursts, Michel Sardou. Pierre Billon, a singer-songwriter who has worked with him since his beginnings, recalls in this excerpt from “Affaires sensibles” having accompanied him to Le Havre for one of his concerts…

“Michel (Sardou) wanted to go see the ‘France’. And there, at the end of the field, he was in the middle of the cows. It was really poignant. Imagine the Eiffel Tower, they tore it down, they put it in a field, it’s just sinister. Michel, that made him angry.”

Pierre Billon, author-composer

in “Sensitive Affairs”

It was then that the singer has an idea: “What a shame, what bullshit! he lets go. “We dropped it, it’s stupid. Here, I’m going to make a song about it.” And this is how the great forgotten made a spectacular return to the lives of the French, on the set of a popular variety show…

“Never call me France again / France has let me down / Never call me France again / it’s my last wish…” The lyrics have the power to move audiences of all stripes and they touch the people of Le Havre right in the heart.

The album sold almost a million copies in a month, the success of the song was phenomenal, and its “huge impact. Because they managed to put a melody, and above all words, on something that everyone felt: this feeling of being downgraded, analysis Christian Clères. There is a feeling that France lost its prestige with the end of the France“. For the sailors who protested against the dismantling of the liner, it is too late anyway, France could not be saved. Two years later, the State would get rid of a symbol that had become too cumbersome.

Excerpt from “Les révoltés du France”, to be seen on September 15, 2024 in “Affaires sensibles”, a co-production of France Télévisions, France Inter and the INA, adapted from a France Inter program.

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