Thomas Dutronc, the son of Françoise Hardy and Jacques Dutronc, arrived shortly before 3:00 p.m. under the dome of the Crematorium, where the singer’s family and friends were meeting, for this final goodbye.
Also present were his artistic family, Etienne Daho, Julien Clerc, Laurent Voulzy, Sheila, Dave, Salvatore Adamo, as well as the director François Ozon, who used several of his songs in his films.
Nicolas and Carla Sarkozy also made the trip, as did the Minister of Culture Rachida Dati and Brigitte Macron, who was booed, noted an AFP journalist.
Hundreds of onlookers came to pay tribute to the woman whose hits “All the boys and girls” or “Comment te dire adieu” rocked their adolescence.
“She has marked our lives, from the 1960s to today,” Jean-Charles, a 70-year-old Parisian retiree, dressed in a Basque beret, 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 buzz, a very beautiful woman compared to the bimbos of today,” says Houria, a 71-year-old Parisian.
Annie, she was not born in 1962 when “All the Boys and Girls” was released, but came to pay homage at the Père-Lachaise cemetery to the woman who reminds her of her mother, whom she always heard listening to his songs.
“I also came for the whole Dutronc family”, Thomas and Jacques, the husband of Françoise Hardy from whom she had been separated for years but not divorced, adds this civil servant, who works nights and took the detour before taking her job.
Die with dignity
It was Thomas Dutronc who announced the death of the yéyé idol on the evening of June 11 on social networks. Under a photo of him and his mother, he wrote a sober “Mom is gone”.
Two days later, he returned to the stage during a poignant concert in Pas-de-Calais. “In England, we say: ‘Elephant in the room’ (the huge subject we avoid talking about, Editor’s note). (…) We cannot translate into French but, for me, my ‘elephant in the room ‘, it’s the departure of my mother towards other skies”, he said in front of an emotional audience.
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 Match, and buried in Corsica, more precisely in Monticello, where Jacques Dutronc lives.
No request for burial of ashes in the cemetery had been made at the start of the week, Monticello town hall said when questioned by AFP. There remains the option of scattering the ashes in nature or placing the funeral urn on a grave on private property.
Françoise Hardy had been fighting the disease for many years. Cancer appeared in his life in 2004, taking several forms and causing him an ordeal.
The artist thus admitted to Paris Match in 2023 that she wanted to “leave soon and quickly, without too many challenges”. She also spoke out for the right to die with dignity and wrote a letter to this effect published at the end of 2023 in La Tribune Dimanche.
The artist, with his 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 by the American magazine Rolling Stone in 2023.
