Françoise Hardy: Forever Young, Once Again

Wednesday morning, French singer Thomas Dutronc announced the disappearance of his mother, late music icon Françoise Hardy, at 80 years old. As the expected laudatory tributes started to flourish online, it was striking to notice that, instead of picturing the snow-haired empress of French pop that Hardy grew up to be, it is the youthful image of the yé-yé girl from the 60s that the international media have chosen to dig out of the grave.

Born in Paris during German Occupation, Françoise Hardy loved sentimental crooners like Georges Guétary, Charles Trenet or Louis Mariano until she discovered American pop and rock’n’roll and started to write her own songs. In 1961, she signs a contract at Vogue, who’s looking for a female equivalent of Johnny Hallyday and appears on Mireille’s Petit Conservatoire de la Chanson, a singing class broadcast on national television. Her first LP contained a French cover of an American song – as it was often the case at the time – but it’s one of her original songs, Tous les garçons et les filles, that made her an international sensation almost overnight. Alongside Johnny, Sheila, Sylvie Vartan, France Gall, Claude François or her future husband Jacques Dutronc, she became the melancholic figurehead for what was coined as the yé-yé (derived from the English “yeah! yeah!”), a style of pop music that derived from American and British rock’n’roll. Six records – and numerous hits, such as Le Temps de l’amour, Mon amie la rose or L’Amitié – followed, much to Hardy’s dismay, as the singer didn’t care much for the way her producers arranged her songs (for years, she tried to prevent their reissue). She later started her own label and on her albums from the late 60s and early 70s, she experimented with new collaborators and new sounds on a string of stellar records like Comment te dire adieu (1968), Soleil (1970), La Question (1971)or Et si je m’en vais avant toi (1972), playfully blending her stylish pop with folk, country, and bossa nova, before recording one of her biggest hits, Message personnel, with Michel Berger. After an odd jazz-soul left-turn in the early 80s and a misguided synth pop detour that delivered another major hit, Partir quand même, she took an 8 year break before re-emerging with Le Danger (1996), a late masterpiece trying on a new alternative sound – high profile collaborations with Blur or Étienne Daho followed. From 2000 on, Hardy released six more critically acclaimed records in which she dwelled on her nostalgia for the past and anguish about her death to come. During her career spanning six decades, she also wrote several novels and appeared in a handful of films but it’s her astute melodic sense, her crystal-clear voice, and her notorious intransigence that made her such a timeless artist.

Throughout decades, Françoise Hardy worked very hard not to be defined as the pretty ingénue of her yé-yé years. So why do we need to come back to the seminal image of what she once was, instead of celebrating all of the achievements that has allowed her to outlast most of her peers and to sustain her fruitful career into late old age? Commemorating the deceased by freezing them as a nostalgic picture of eternal youth unfortunately says a lot about the way we consider ageing as a form of decline from said youth instead of the process that allows us to build a rich and complex life path until our last moments.

Written by: Dr. Alexandre Moussa

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