Ideology, tragedy, celebrity

Although Piaf’s early work in the 1930s had occasionally lent itself to appropriation by the Left, America completed her discursive shift from voice of revolt to voice of France. Identification with her nation helps explain the emotional character of her reception by French audiences, still founded on the myth that she always sang about herself. That myth was greatly intensified by the death of her lover, the world-famous boxer Marcel Cerdan, in 1949, which united Piaf and her public in national mourning. From then on, as her health deteriorated, her life and work were constructed in tandem as a tragedy. And her lyricists, composers and biographers picked up and embellished this construction, so that her late performances became quasi-religious rituals of emotion. At the same time, her love affairs and health problems were being seized on by the media, turning her into an early example of the celebrity diva.

Performing Piaf

Piaf’s posthumous meanings and uses today derive more from her life than her work. Examining a range of sources, including fan mail, the chapter identifies a number of meanings in circulation. It argues that the intertextual Piaf —the product of new narratives of existing narratives—has drifted ever further from the reality of her life and work, a process that has steadily turned her into an all-purpose metaphor: of a popular Paris vanishing beneath urbanisation, of gender and sexuality, and more generally of the universal human condition: love, joy, suffering, decline and death. The notion of cultural memory is useful for understanding this process and is embodied in the various performances of the Piaf story, from Pam Gems’s play Piaf to Olivier Dahan’s film La Môme (La Vie en rose).

Remembering Piaf

The chapter examines the ways in which Piaf has been remembered, commemorated and patrimonialised, from her death to the celebrations of her centenary in 2015. It notes the steady flow of films, songs, plays, documentaries and tribute acts that have been produced about her and at the growing tendency to mark significant anniversaries of her life and death. These phenomena have not been limited to France but have included the UK, the USA and Japan among others. The chapter identifies the ways in which her once transgressive persona has been normalised and legitimated by these processes of commemoration. It also compares the posthumous meanings Piaf has acquired in France, the UK and the US, concluding that the imagined Piaf of today is an intertext.

Conclusion

This chapter pulls together threads running through the book. Piaf’s talent alone does not explain her persistent position in global memory. Hence the need for a cultural history investigating what the imagined Piaf has come to mean. The book has focused on an invented Piaf rather than the supposedly real Piaf. It has also brought out how the imagined trajectory of her life has been structured like a tragedy. And it has shed light on the evolution of French popular music and French culture in the last and present centuries: mass culture and Americanisation, national and international perceptions of French chanson, and the steady transformation of Piaf into what Pierre Nora calls ‘un lieu de mémoire’.

A new Piaf

This chapter covers the late 1940s and 1950s, a period in which her international fame soared but her health began to decline. She sought to reinvent herself by assembling and directing a new creative team and by departing from the realist song, which she now saw as restrictive, though this latter attempt ultimately proved unsuccessful. She was by now in complete charge of her career and of the public image she aimed to project. She wrote many of her own songs but also intervened creatively in the realisation of those written by others, which, increasingly, were composed specifically for her invented persona. Significantly, her work during this period is often characterised by an awareness of la chanson française as an aesthetic and a value. In this respect, her songs became more self-referential.

Inventing la Môme

The chapter begins with a brief biography of Piaf’s early years as a singer but focuses primarily on how the Piaf myth—the imagined Piaf that France and the world would come to know--was invented. The process of invention was the work initially of Piaf herself, who fabricated a life story almost from the beginning. But she was soon joined in this task by her first impresario, Raymond Asso, who wrote the lyrics for many of her early songs, and Marguerite Monnot, who composed the music. This team, progressively joined by others, worked together to produce a new iteration of the well-known realist song genre: Piaf’s songs were read through the narratives of the singer’s life, but, at the same time, those narratives were themselves read through the songs. This reciprocal identification between song and life would form the core meaning of Piaf’s stardom.

Introduction

This chapter introduces the question of Piaf’s meanings 100 years after her birth. It discusses the problematic nature of Piaf’s biography and opts for an alternative mode of analysis defined as cultural history, examining the singer as cultural phenomenon. It briefly surveys the existing literature on Piaf in order to clarify what distinguishes the approach adopted in the book. This approach is characterised as a critical analysis of the Piaf legend and of issues of cultural memory, Frenchness, and the transnational circulation of Piaf’s meanings. It also includes a consideration of the author’s own ethnographic distance.

High art, low culture

The chapter explores why, although she wrote many songs, she was never accepted as primarily an auteur-compositeur-interprète: the singer-songwriter figure who became so revered in France from the 1960s Her work during the late 1940s and 1950s moved steadily towards a version of auteurism and artistic authenticity. Yet she would never entirely shrug off the brash populism associated with music hall, which was turning into the mass commercial culture of the 1950s. Her position in this binary divide was altered by her success in New York in 1947-48. In America, the cultural baggage she had studiously assembled in France was recontextualised and reappropriated and she returned to France not so much Americanised as transfigured: an icon of a certain idea of Frenchness and international stardom.

Piaf and her public

The chapter moves from the invention of Piaf to the ways in which her public became the crucible in which the imagined Piaf was forged. It examines the early responses to her performances, first in cabaret and subsequently in the larger music halls of Paris and elsewhere. Reviewers were struck from the outset by her astonishing voice and its semiotic embodiment in her tiny, vulnerable body, producing what Barthes calls the grain of the voice. The chapter goes on to identify three particular sets of meanings which emerge from these responses: society and politics; the body, gender and sexuality; and religion and spirituality.

Losing Piaf

This chapter examines the meanings of Piaf’s death in 1963. By the early 1960s, France’s experience of decolonisation, migrations, consumerism and the baby boom was marking the end of a certain conception of chanson which Piaf had embodied for 25 years. Her death avoided the question of whether her particular version of chanson would have survived the arrival of rock and pop on the one hand and the rise of the ‘poetic’ singer-songwriter on the other. Her health problems, which included addiction, were affecting the quality of her voice and performance. Her booking at the Olympia in 1960-61 was heralded as her come-back and this impression was boosted by her introducing her supposedly autobiographical song ‘Non je ne regrette rien’, which became her swan song.