“Mom is gone”, Thomas Dutronc soberly declared in a message shared on Facebook and Instagram. French song icon Françoise Hardy died at the age of 80, her son announced on Tuesday evening, June 11. Author, performer and composer, she leaves behind an impressive discography.
From All the boys and girlsalbum which revealed her to the general public in 1962, she recorded 28 albums until Nobody else, published in 2018. The melancholic singer icon, married to Jacques Dutronc, will have spanned 60 years of French song. Bertrand Dicale, music specialist, pays tribute on - to the singer’s career. “Coco Chanel, Juliette Gréco, Françoise Hardy, are women who were both artists but also models for millions of women and thousands of artists”underlines Bertrand Dicale. “She’s basically the equivalent of David Bowie.”
“She embodies something that is eternal”
For the - journalist, with François Hardy, “we are not in nostalgia for the yéyé years, we are not in nostalgia for the 1960s, we are in a current artist. Like David Bowie, like Bob Dylan, like the Rolling Stones, she embodies something which is eternal and which goes far beyond the collective experience of French yéyés”.
Bertrand Dicale greets again “an author, composer, performer”but also “a fashion icon”. “She did a lot for sartorial elegance, for style, for class.” The journalist discusses his “supreme Parisian and slightly bourgeois elegance”. Françoise Hardy has “this silhouette and this way of facing life with immense poetry, immense frankness”.
Bertrand Dicale discusses the texts of the songs “what inspired her marriage, her extremely painful union with Jacques Dutronc“. She has “during his whole life the feeling of not being loved enough, of loving much more than he loves,” explains the journalist. According to him, when we put end-to-end” the texts, “it’s dramatic, tragic, but she says it with a nobility, an elegance, a charm, a poetry and a lightness which are not only pop works, but which are also a life lesson”. “For decades to come, we will take her for one of those poets who help people to live”adds Bertrand Dicale.
Last December, the interpreter of How to say goodbye to youwho had declared herself several times in favor of euthanasia, recounted in Paris Match live a “nightmare“because of his pharyngeal cancer and wished”leave soon and quickly, without too many hardships, such as the impossibility of breathing.”
