Bruant and his legacy

Bruant's most enduring legacy are his ‘chansons et monologues réalistes’, many of which he wrote between 1884 and 1895. These were inspired by anonymous street songs, his direct observations of the Parisian underworld and his careful study of its spoken language. They often featured the pimps, prostitutes and criminals who haunted the outer neighbourhoods of the capital, narrating their life stories in the first person, in truculent slang and in reference to their ‘patch’. Bruant also wrote about the derelict, the homeless and, less commonly, ordinary workers. He promoted himself as a ‘chansonnier populaire’ (‘people's songwriter’) and champion of the poor, although many of his lyrics – by turns tragic and comical – expressed a fatalistic worldview that diminished their subversive potential. However, as Dietmar Rieger has rightly argued, Bruant's œuvre was multifaceted and resists easy generalisations.Footnote ³

Bruant set his lyrics to simple melodies based on Gregorian chants, hunting tunes or military marches and arranged for piano; he also intended his monologues to be spoken over a piano accompaniment. He performed his material in a declamatory style at Rodolphe Salis's small Montmartre cabaret, Le Chat Noir (84 Boulevard Rochechouart), which he took over in 1885 and renamed Le Mirliton, in the larger cafés-concerts of central Paris, and during tours of provincial France and North Africa. Patrons of Le Mirliton could order beer and join in the refrains while Bruant subjected them to withering, vulgar abuse. This was part of an act that attracted writers, artists and slummers from both Parisian and international high society while further compromising the anti-authoritarian or compassionate dimension of his songs and ultimately earning him a fortune. Many of Bruant's songs were published in Le Mirliton's eponymous journal and in three collected volumes under the title Dans la rue (1889, 1895 and 1909).Footnote ⁴ Between 1905 and 1912, he recorded about 80 of his songs and monologues (a quarter of his repertoire) for posterity, accompanied by a small, brass-dominated band.

By the interwar years, the genre of chanson réaliste launched by Bruant had overshadowed the tradition of chanson sociale associated with the revolutionary upheavals of the 19th century while evolving in a number of important ways. As Catherine Dutheil-Pessin points out, its most famous exponents were women – Damia, Fréhel and Édith Piaf – who amplified its tragic dimension through their expressive use of voice and gesture. Dutheil-Pessin also argues that chanson réaliste acquired a more universal appeal by sublimating social inequalities in an ‘aesthetic of tears’ and addressing listeners in a popular vernacular rather than criminal slang (Dutheil-Pessin Reference Dutheil-Pessin2004, p. 10). Although the term chanson réaliste is sometimes used exclusively to refer to this tragic vein, Chantal Brunschwig reminds us that the genre retained a festive mode, reinforced by its fusion with the accordéon-musette music born in the working-class dancehalls of the rue de Lappe (Bastille) around 1905 (Brunschwig Reference Brunschwig1988, p. 17; Cf. Beaurenaut Reference Beaurenaut1993). The ubiquity of chanson réaliste during the interwar period also inspired various parodies. Realist songs were performed everywhere: in cheap bars, exclusive nightclubs, cabarets, music halls and bals-musettes. They continued to attract well-heeled audiences, but increasingly evoked working-class leisure and solidarity, and reached a mass audience via radio, gramophone and cinema.

The 1968 years saw the convergence of two groups of performers who claimed an affiliation with Bruant and the May movement. The first group had already cut their teeth on the Parisian cabaret circuit of the 1950s and early 1960s, either as auteurs-compositeurs-interprètes (‘singer-songwriters’) or as simple interprètes (‘singers’) of a poetic repertoire that embraced Bruant along with Pierre Mac Orlan, Jacques Prévert, Louis Aragon and many others. Among this group, Mouloudji, Francesca Solleville (1932–) and Marc Ogeret (1932–2018) played a particularly important role after May 1968 in disseminating Bruant's songs through new studio recordings, live performances and – in Mouloudji's case – a book in the popular ‘Poésies et Chansons’ collection published by Seghers. The second group emerged after the May events and drew inspiration from diverse sources including American folksong, country music and hard rock. François Béranger (1937–2003) and Renaud (1952–) stand out as Bruant's most obvious heirs, despite only rarely recording his songs; they have been nicknamed respectively ‘le Bruant des seventies’ and ‘le Bruant des banlieues’ (‘the Bruant of the suburbs’).Footnote ⁵

All of these performers emphasised the appeal of Bruant's language. Mouloudji, for example, compared him to the medieval troubadours, the fifteenth-century poet and outlaw François Villon and the provocative 20th-century writer Louis-Ferdinand Céline.Footnote ⁶ In Mouloudji's view, Bruant's literary prowess and ability to distil the slang of the street gave his lyrics ‘even more power when read than when heard’ and ‘a resonance that more than fifty years have not dampened’ (Mouloudji Reference Mouloudji1972, pp. 14–16). Bruant's language, like Céline's, certainly had an aggressive and sensual dimension whose attraction for those seeking to challenge the authoritarian and conservative aspects of the French state during the 1968 years is easy to understand. Yet the subject matter of Bruant's œuvre seems to me to have played an equally important, if less explicitly acknowledged, role in his renewed popularity.

‘We're part of the underworld’

Bruant's songs about the Parisian underworld resonated in particular with a culture of marginality that reached its apogee between May 1968 and the turn of the 1980s. The term pègre (‘underworld’), regularly associated with his œuvre, acquired specific revolutionary connotations when, in the wake of the ‘second night of the barricades’ (24–25 May 1968), the Minister of the Interior, Christian Fouchet, declared that the student movement had been compromised by the increasing presence of anarchists and a murderous ‘pègre’ that he exhorted Parisians to ‘vomit up’ (cited in Ross Reference Ross2002, p. 108).Footnote ⁷ As Kristin Ross points out, the Communist newspaper L'Humanité followed suit (Reference Ross2002, p. 108). The Coordination des comités d'action at the Sorbonne responded to Fouchet's outburst by turning his insulting epithet against the government (Schnapp and Vidal-Naquet Reference Schnapp and Vidal-Naquet1969, pp. 286–7). One group of committees took a different tack, declaring: ‘Workers, clerks, teachers, students, farmers, we all belong to what the government dares to call the underworld’ (cited in Schnapp and Vidal-Naquet Reference Schnapp and Vidal-Naquet1969, pp. 288–9). The latter stance predominated and was shared by writers and philosophers such as Marguerite Duras and Maurice Blanchot (Ross Reference Ross2002, p. 108). Most importantly, it provided protesters with a persona for speaking truth to power, or what Ross describes as a ‘new political identity or subjectivity’ (Reference Ross2002, p. 108). Dominique Grange – who had performed Bruant's material in her native Lyon from an early age – captured the moment in a protest-song released in autumn 1968:

Such declarations reflected a broader interest in the revolutionary potential of the most marginal members of society, inherited from diverse sources including 19th-century anarchism, Mao Zedong and Herbert Marcuse. Student protesters from the recently built campus of the Sorbonne in the north-western Parisian suburb of Nanterre – the crucible of the May movement – identified strongly with the Algerian inhabitants of the neighbouring shantytown, La Folie, even though relations between the two groups were occasionally strained (Lemire Reference Lemire, Artières and Zancarini-Fournel2010, pp. 137–43). In the mid-1960s, various members of the Situationist International (1957–1972) expressed their hope that the raw energy of the blousons noirs – gangs of working-class youths whose propensity for violence had provoked a media frenzy in the late 1950s and early 1960s – might one day be harnessed in the service of revolution.Footnote ⁹ This hope was apparently realised in May 1968 when, according to René Viénet, it took only ‘one night of barricades for the blousons noirs to become politicised and to find themselves in complete agreement with the most advanced section of the occupation movement’ (Reference Viénet1968, p. 138). During the second night of the barricades in Lyon, student protesters were joined not only by immigrant workers and blousons noirs but also by prostitutes and trimards (local street people), three of whom were wrongly accused of causing the death of the police commissioner, Jean Lacroix (Mathieu Reference Mathieu, Porhel and de Ochandiano2017, pp. 82–3, 103–4). The marginal figures employed to maintain security in occupied faculties – trimards in Lyon, katangais in Paris, zonards in Nantes, loulous in Grenoble and Le Mouvement révolutionnaire octobre in Bordeaux – antagonised or frightened many students but, according to Claire Auzias (Reference Auzias2017), played a more significant role in the May events than has previously been acknowledged.Footnote ¹⁰

An increased awareness of those excluded from the economic prosperity of the so-called trente glorieuses (the ‘thirty glorious years’ from 1945 to 1975), the rejection of work as determined by capitalist precepts, the repression and radicalisation of far-left groups during Georges Pompidou's presidency (1969–1974) and the recession provoked by the first oil crisis of 1973 reinforced this culture of marginality. The mythology of the zonard or loubard – a kind of latter-day blouson noir – took hold in the early 1970s (Merle Reference Merle1990, pp. 80–1).Footnote ¹¹ The zonard was often represented as a victim of late capitalist society but also as a repository of the fraternal, anti-authoritarian values of May 1968 and, importantly, as a figure who continued to occupy the street. Many former soixante-huitards were also drawn to gangsters who described their crimes as anti-capitalist acts. These included the Belle Époque anarchist, Jules Bonnot (1876–1912) and his 1970s counterpart, Jacques Mesrine (1936–1979). Pierre Goldman (1944–1979) was a particularly revered figure. In the late 1960s, Goldman had managed security for student unions, frequented a guerilla movement in Venezuela and, on his return to France, attempted unsuccessfully to foment an armed uprising. He had also participated in a series of armed robberies and was subsequently convicted of the murder of two pharmacists.Footnote ¹² The conviction was quashed and Goldman released from prison in 1976, only to be assassinated in mysterious circumstances three years later. Goldman himself had rejected the idea that his criminal activities complemented his revolutionary aspirations. Yet thousands of admirers attended his funeral, while the former Maoist and editor-in-chief of Libération, Serge July, proclaimed:

It is this ‘quest for action in delinquent mode’ that gave Bruant's lyrics a particular resonance during the 1968 years. The ferociously violent monologue, ‘Sonneur’ (‘Bruiser’, 1885), which Ogeret released on two separate albums in 1978, was perhaps the most obvious example of Bruant's repertoire to echo the soixante-huitards’ fascination with the underworld. This is partly because of the repetition of the term pègre but also because of the narrator's contempt for work and his use of cobblestones – the soixante-huitards’ iconic weapon – to inflict maximum injury on his bourgeois prey:

Ogeret's warm, husky voice, unadorned intonation and avuncular appearance sometimes worked against the aggressive nature of his material. In this case, however, he infused the monologue with a plausible sense of menace and rage, amplified by his decision to recite the lines without musical accompaniment.

One of Bruant's better-known monologues, ‘Lézard’ (1886), celebrated delinquency in a more light-hearted way. The narrator spends his days sleeping at the Buttes Chaumont while living off his sister's earnings, which her pimp – his ‘brother-in-law’ – is happy to share:

Mouloudji was particularly fond of ‘Lézard’, which he performed throughout the 1968 years to audiences comprising his old fans and – as many reviewers pointed out – large numbers of young people. In his 1970 recording, he recited the lines over an electric organ accompaniment suggestive of a fairground theme, yawning exaggeratedly and sniggering in response to the listener's imagined outrage at the relationship between the narrator and his sister (Mouloudji and Solleville 1970). To be sure, the comical aspect of the monologue combined with Mouloudji's thin if beautiful voice, languid delivery and innate charm as a performer could undermine its subversive potential. A reviewer of his 1974 concert at Le Théâtre de la Renaissance, alluding to the singer's Kabyle origins on his father's side, remarked that ‘Bruant's “Lézard” proves that it is possible to live happily in France, even for a wog [métèque] like Mouloudji’ (Lemaire Reference Lemaire1974).Footnote ¹³ Ogeret (1978) avoided this pitfall by recording ‘Lézard’ without music and in a serious tone of voice, but at the cost of the monologue's playfulness. Renaud (1981) struck a happier medium when he opened his 1980 concert at the Bobino music hall with a slightly updated version of the text, maintaining both its humour and cockiness as he recited the lines in a working-class twang over a soft accompaniment by virtuoso accordionist Joss Baselli and jazz guitarist Jacky Giraudo. Renaud's intrepretation in particular echoed the spirit of play and revolt inherent in the soixante-huitard catchphrase ‘ne travaillez jamais’ (‘never work’), originally formulated by the Situationist Guy Debord in 1953. Debord himself subsequently chose parts of ‘Lézard’ as an epigraph for a 1994 documentary about his life and philosophy (Cornaud 1994).

It is true that Bruant's underworld figures are animated by a desire for violent revenge or easy wealth rather than social change. Yet their visceral rejection of bourgeois constraints and salaried work became a significant reference point in the wake of May 1968. This was reflected in a number of original songs such as François Béranger's first single, the semi-autobiographical ‘Tranche de vie’ (‘Slice of life’, 1969). Béranger's picaresque narrator relates the everyday humiliations suffered by his working-class family after moving from a rural village to the industrial suburbs of Paris and his own, repeated clashes with authority. Forced into a mind-numbing factory job at the age of 15, he turns to a life of crime while learning the songs of Aristide Bruant.

‘Tranche de vie’ referenced Bruant's songs in other ways, for example in its use of the first person and contemporary slang. Its very title echoed Bruant's ‘slice of life’ approach to his subject matter. The narrator is also punished for his misdemeanours by being sent to fight in the Algerian War (1954–1962), in the same way that Bruant's recalcitrant conscripts are forced into line in the brutal disciplinary units and prisons of North Africa, in songs such as ‘À Biribi’ (1891) (Bruant Reference Bruant1895, pp. 53–5). The anti-authoritarianism of Béranger's protagonist – like his interest in Bruant – pre-dates May 1968 but leads inexorably to his participation in the May riots, which earns him a savage beating at the hands of the police. To this extent, he demonstrates a greater awareness than Bruant's characters of the social forces that determine his predicament and a readiness to resist them. His prior form nonetheless means that he shares a similar fate, ending up in prison if not on the scaffold of the guillotine.

The casual tone of ‘Tranche de vie’ – emphasised by the timbre of Béranger's voice – was also reminiscent of Bruant's songs, but tinged with a darker nihilism that echoed the sentiments of many protesters in the immediate aftermath of May–June 1968. In contrast, Béranger set his lyrics to an energetic if repetitive bluegrass composition, punctuated by a brief mirliton-style riff at the end of each verse: a musical allusion perhaps to the name of Bruant's cabaret or a representation of contemporary society as a complete circus. ‘Tranche de vie’ caught the ear of Europe 1 radio host, Michel Lancelot, who played it endlessly on his evening programme Campus. Most importantly, Béranger's song spoke to many soixante-huitards, one of whom explained to the music journalists Sylvie Coulomb and Didier Varrod: ‘Thanks to him and his song “Tranche de vie”, which Michel Lancelot played every night on his show, we were able to synthesise all of our scattered ideas’ (cited in Coulumb and Varrod 1988, p. 41).

Renaud, who had first performed Bruant's songs as a busker in 1973, reinvented the realist genre in the second half of the 1970s after befriending a group of loubards from the Parisian suburbs of La Courneuve and Argenteuil. His friends provided him with a language and a persona through which he described their existence in dozens of songs while also defending the aspirations of May 1968. His 1980 concert programme, Le Zonard déchaîné, was a Situationist-inspired détournement (‘reappropriation’) of the satirical newspaper Le Canard enchaîné that featured tongue-in-cheek ‘reports’ alluding to May 1968, international events and Renaud's outlaw image. He emphasised his affiliation with Bruant by devoting the first half of the concert to a realist repertoire – including Bruant's ‘Rue Saint-Vincent’ (1906)Footnote ¹⁴ as well as ‘Lézard’ – and the second half to his own material.Footnote ¹⁵

The latter included the absurdist ‘Pourquoi d'abord’ (‘Yeah but why’, 1980), which drew together the mythology of the blousons noirs, anarchist principles and Bruant's songs while attacking the prurient interest of journalists in Renaud's social origins and authenticity. The song takes the form of a dialogue between the performer and an irritating child whom he has kidnapped for ransom, accompanied by a Renaissance dance played on harpsichord. The child, represented in a falsetto voice, badgers Renaud with questions about his blouson noir, his loubard credentials and his values. Renaud responds with an anarchist declaration of faith while asserting his love of life and its simple pleasures, which include pasta shells, accordéon-musette, beer and smoking a Gauloise cigarette while listening to Bruant sing.

‘Pourquoi d'abord’ closed Renaud's studio album, Marche à l'ombre, which had just been released (February 1980) and which he dedicated, among others, to ‘Paul Toul’, an alias used by Mesrine, and ‘Michel P-38’, a factory worker with whom Renaud had fraternised during a concert at Longwy in support of striking steel workers. This is an important reminder that the celebration of delinquents during the 1968 years, while often accompanied by a rejection of work, did not equate to a rejection of workers themselves.

‘No more bosses’

Bruant himself had expressed little interest in the notion of proletarian agency that would become so central to the 1968 years. For the socialist songwriter and former Communard Jean-Baptiste Clément, the artistic cabarets of Montmartre had in fact exacerbated the confusion between the ‘labouring classes’ and the ‘dangerous classes’ that working-class activists had been struggling to correct since the mid-19th century.Footnote ¹⁶ In 1900, Clément denounced the cabarets as vectors of pornography and places where ‘everything that is Progress, Justice and Humanity is ridiculed, [and] where, on the pretext of realism, the poor are made to sound like prowlers and workers like pimps’ (cited in Compte-rendu des travaux du Congrès de la chanson 1902, p. 29; Cf. Rancière Reference Rancière1978, p. 64). In 1973, the music historian Serge Dillaz reminded his contemporaries that ‘singing about lowlife has never been the same thing as singing about the people. It is not the revolt of the wage earner against capitalist domination that Bruant sang about, but the scum of the outer boulevards’ (Dillaz Reference Dillaz1973, p. 48). The producer of a Swiss television documentary about Bruant (1975) went a step further, arguing that ‘in his texts, Bruant sometimes appears like a real reactionary. He sang more about the “underworld”, prostitutes and “ponces” than about workers dying of starvation’ (cited in W Reference W.1975).

Yet there was a consensus among Bruant's successors of the 1968 years that his songs spoke for the people as a whole and not exclusively for its criminal elements. Moreover, Mouloudji, Solleville, Ogeret, Béranger and Renaud all had strong ties to the working-class movement and drew as much inspiration from the tradition of chanson sociale represented by Clément as from the apparently antithetical tradition of chanson réaliste inaugurated by Bruant. This has led some historians of popular song to conclude that Bruant's successors misunderstood the true nature of his œuvre (Robine Reference Robine1995, pp. 156–7; Viau Reference Viau, Hirschi, Pillet and Vaillant2006, pp. 299–300, 311–12). However, one could argue that it was possible to invest Bruant's songs with revolutionary significance whatever his original intentions. Indeed numerous tracts in May 1968 insisted that those whom the government and the Communist Party condemned as the ‘underworld’ were an integral part of the working classes. The 19th-century anarchists Mikhail Bakunin and Max Stirner, who had argued that the ‘lumpenproletariat’ had a key role to play in any future proletarian revolution because of its capacity to resist and survive the hegemonic forces of capitalism, provided soixante-huitards with an historical precedent for reconciling labour and crime. In cultural terms, some French anarchist newspapers of the 1880s and 1890s, such as Le Père peinard, had appealed to working-class readers in a language closer to that of Bruant's songs than to the nobler imagery preferred by Clément.Footnote ¹⁷ Bruant's œuvre also became working class in the context of its subsequent reception and performance. Béranger recalled that his mother, a seamstress who sang throughout the working day in the manner of her 19th-century forebears, knew by heart Bruant's entire repertoire (cited Kleim Reference Kleim1970).

While Bruant focused on the underworld, he did occasionally evoke the working-class movement. The narrator of ‘Pus d'patrons’ (‘No more bosses’, 1890), which Ogeret recorded for his highly successful album Chansons ‘contre’, 1880–1914 Footnote ¹⁸ (released just after the events of May–June 1968), regularly attends political meetings. Although he admits to understanding little of what he hears, he proclaims:

The Maitron online website describes ‘Pas d'patrons’ [sic] as an ‘anti-worker’ text, no doubt because it promoted a stereotypical image of workers as rough and uneducated (‘BRUAND Aristide’ 2019). The narrator's language perhaps justifies Clément's accusation that realist songs made workers sound like pimps, while Steinlen's accompanying illustrations in Dans la rue represented the audience at the meeting as inebriated if jovial hecklers. Ogeret's 1968 version also has a jauntier feel than many of his other recordings.Footnote ¹⁹ However, it would be a mistake to attach an exclusively anti-proletarian meaning to the song. In the sleeve notes for Ogeret's album, his collaborator Romi acknowledged that ‘Aristide Bruant, putting words in the mouth of an “enragé”, imagined that he was ridiculing this infatuation with Bakunin's theories’, but continued: ‘In reality, his declaration hardly seemed exaggerated at all […] It pretty much mirrored the goals of Ravachol and a few other fanatics inspired by the utopian ideas of literary men’ (Ogeret 1968).Footnote ²⁰ Romi was clearly thinking of the latter-day enragés of May 1968, for whom Bakunin and the anarchist terrorist Ravachol were familiar and admired figures. It also seems possible that there was enough in ‘Pus d'patrons’ to resonate with those who had denounced ‘les cadences infernales’ (‘the hellish production pace’), promoted the concept of autogestion (‘self-management’) or even contemplated the Situationist vision of a world shaped by experimental play rather than mind-numbing work. It is worth noting, as a point of comparison, that the working-class hero of Maurice Mac-Nab and Camille Baron's ‘Le Grand Métingue du Métropolitain’ (1887), also included on Ogeret's album, was written in a similar style and featured a pugnacious drunk; this hadn't prevented the song from remaining a perennial favourite among the revolutionary Left (Brunschwig et al. Reference Brunschwig, Calvet and Klein1981, p. 190).

Bruant's most famous song about the working classes, ‘Les canuts’ (‘The silk workers’), inspired several cover versions during the 1968 years. Bruant had written and performed the song for the 1894 Lyon Exposition. The lyrics, set to a dramatic, Gregorian-style composition in a minor key, paid tribute to the city's silk workers, who had led one of the first organised working-class uprisings in the early 1830s:

‘Les canuts’ was one of the rare songs in which Bruant eschewed street slang in favour of a more heroic, romantic, register. Some historians have argued that the historical remoteness of its subject would have diminished its impact even in Bruant's time (Rieger 1988, pp. 208–9; Viau Reference Viau, Hirschi, Pillet and Vaillant2006, p. 309). Yet of all his songs, it is ‘Les canuts’ that has been most closely associated with May 1968. A recent compilation, L'esprit de mai 68, paired Marc Robine's 1993 version with the soixante-huitard slogan ‘Ne me libère pas, je m'en charge’ (‘Don't free me, I'll do it myself’). It seems likely that ‘Les canuts’ was performed during the events themselves, although this is surprisingly difficult to substantiate. Bernard Lambert, of the Centre Départemental des Jeunes Agriculteurs (Nantes), nonetheless referenced the song during a speech on 8 May 1968 (Vigna and Zancarini-Fournel Reference Vigna and Zancarini-Fournel2009, p. 171). Jeannine Marest, a chemist who took part in the occupation of a SIGMA factory in the Lyon region, recalls a visit from the preeminent historian of the canuts, Maurice Moissonnier, who spoke to strikers about their illustrious predecessors (Marest Reference Marestn.d.). One of the trimards described by Claire Auzias was nicknamed ‘Le Canut’. More generally, La Croix Rousse, the neighbourhood where many canuts had lived and worked, became a hotbed of activism in May 1968 and was notably home to the Lyon campus of the École des Beaux-Arts.

‘Les canuts’ was certainly revived not long after the events. For Mouloudji's 1970 stage show at Le Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier, ‘Dans la rue’ de Bruant, Solleville performed the song alongside some of Bruant's realist classics while dressed – in her own words – ‘en pute 1900’ (‘as a whore from 1900’; Legras and Solleville Reference Legras and Solleville2004, p. 178), thereby reinforcing the link between the people and the underworld. On the ensuing recording, her classically trained voice – which has a piercing quality similar to Bruant's – conveyed the drama of the lyrics notwithstanding the oddly thin arrangement, marred by a tinny-sounding electric organ and the jarring inclusion of a steel-string guitar (Mouloudji and Solleville 1970). In 1981, she recorded another version over a simpler yet more effective piano and orchestral accompaniment, for a textile trade-union homage to the canuts on the 150th anniversary of their revolt (Lachaize and Solleville 1981). Ogeret also recorded ‘Les canuts’ twice: for his 1973 album, Chansons de révolte et d'espoir, and again in 1978 for Bruant: 60 chansons et monologues. On their second versions, both artists removed the major modulation at the end of the song, as if to suggest musically that the revolt was unfinished business. Solleville, like Ogeret and Yves Montand (1955) before her, also replaced the last line (‘Nous sommes tout nus’) with the more assertive ‘Nous n'irons plus nus’ (‘No longer shall we have nothing to wear’). It is worth noting that Mouloudji's selection of songs for his 1972 book opened with ‘Les canuts’ followed by ‘À Biribi’ – the same two songs that earned Bruant a place six years later in Robert Brécy's Florilège de la chanson révolutionnaire (Brécy 1978, pp. 163–4).Footnote ²²

The historical connection between Bruant, Lyon and May 1968 also emerged briefly but powerfully in French cinema, in Bertrand Tavernier's first feature film, L'horloger de Saint-Paul (1974). Loosely based on Georges Simenon's novel, L'horloger d'Everton (1954), the story focuses on Michel Descombes, a modest watchmaker who lives and works in the old centre of Lyon and whose life is thrown into turmoil when the police explain that his son, Bernard, has fled with his girlfriend after one or both of them killed a predatory security guard employed at the factory where she worked. A cynical journalist and his photographer subsequently arrive at Michel's apartment to extract information about Bernard. Michel, who has fallen asleep on his son's bed while trying to process the news of his crime, wakes up to answer the door. At the head of the bed, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec's famous poster advertising Bruant's cabaret act at Les Ambassadeurs (1892) gradually appears, the singer's trademark red scarf echoing the red bedspread. As the journalist pressures Michel to talk about Bernard while looking around the room, Bruant's frozen image functions like a fourth character, hovering disdainfully over the journalist's smarminess and indiscretion. Finally, the camera cuts to a series of cityscapes including La Croix Rousse.

Like Mouloudji's song, ‘Comme une chanson de Bruant’, Tavernier's scene left it to viewers to make the connection between the singer and May 1968. It is clear, however, that Toulouse-Lautrec's poster of Bruant – like the quotations from Céline, Alphonse Allais and May 1968 pinned on the wall of Bernard's bedroom – stands in for the young fugitive, who only appears much later in a few laconic scenes. More broadly, the film evokes the oppressive atmosphere of Pompidou's France in the wake of May 1968 while denouncing the media's coverage of so-called ‘gauchiste’ (‘far-left’) crime to obfuscate rather than elucidate industrial unrest and to influence the result of the imminent presidential election. It also suggests a dialectic relationship between crime, work and power rather than treating them as separate worlds.

Bruant and the ‘mode rétro’

While the Bruant moment of the 1968 years was driven by a culture of marginality, it also announced and was amplified by a culture of nostalgia or what is often described as the ‘mode rétro’ (‘retro fashion’), first identified as such in 1973. As Pascal Ory has argued, this was primarily a response to the sense of rootlessness engendered by modernity and exacerbated by three parallel crises: an economic crisis (in the wake of the 1973 oil embargo); an intellectual crisis arising from challenges to revolutionary ideology; and an aesthetic crisis that called into question the relevance of the avant-garde. Ory notes that the ‘mode rétro’ was characterised by a keen interest in the fin de siècle and the second quarter of the 20th century. Its ‘refuge value’, he adds, dominated French cultural life – including advertising – throughout the 1970s (Ory Reference Ory1983, pp. 108, 113).

The Bruant moment no doubt brought solace to some and profit to others but it also represented an attempt to preserve something of May 1968's revolutionary heritage. This may seem paradoxical in light of soixante-huitard slogans such as ‘Cours camarade, le vieux monde est derrière toi’ (‘Run comrade, the old world is behind you’). More specifically, many soixante-huitards spurned the old-fashioned, realist-style songs that had received extensive airplay just before the May events (Coulomb and Varrod Reference Coulomb and Varrod1988, pp. 15, 27). Even in 1973, when Renaud embraced the realist classics together with the accordion as a counterpoint to the songs of Bob Dylan that dominated the repertoire of other buskers, some of his friends made fun of his ‘uncool’ tastes (cited Bellaïche and Prévost-Thomas Reference Bellaïche and Prévost-Thomas1995, p. 43).Footnote ²³

However, as Barbara Lebrun points out, nostalgia can express a broad spectrum of impulses, from regressive flight into the past to a more progressive ‘destabilisation’ of the present (Reference Lebrun2009, p. 47). Dominique Kalifa has shown that, during the 1970s, the Belle Époque was valued more for its transgressive aspects than for the carefree, frothy stereotypes disseminated during the 1950s (Reference Kalifa2017, pp. 153, 164–6, 214). For Bruant's successors of the 1968 years, the grittiness of his songs seems to have represented on one level an emblem of resistance to the social and cultural ‘cleansing’ of Paris during the trente glorieuses. The rationalisation and homogenisation of urban space, work practices and entertainment were hardly new phenomena but accelerated after World War II, producing an increasingly acute sense of alienation and ennui (Ross Reference Ross1995). For all their anti-vieux monde rhetoric, many former soixante-huitards turned to the pre-war past for images that evoked a more authentic, organic sense of community, that announced their own use of the street as a site of sociability and protest and that, ultimately, might offer an alternative modernity to the one expressed in the monolithic housing estates and technocratic culture of the trente glorieuses.Footnote ²⁴

While Bruant's songs may not have met all of these criteria, they represented the urban periphery as a place of libidinous energy and provided a symbolic lineage between those excluded from the city centre by Baron Haussmann's renovations (1853–1870) and in the wake of the Commune (1871), and those pushed out even further into the shantytowns and housing estates of the trente glorieuses. The only song of Bruant's that Béranger recorded (in 1970), ‘À la Goutte d'Or’ (1892), was itself a lament for the disappearing working-class courting rituals on the eastern slope of Montmartre, although these had been undermined less by redevelopment than by the arrival of wealthy suitors, including – ironically – the seductive gangsters who Bruant celebrated elsewhere in his songs (Bruant 1895, pp. 189–93). According to Thierry Séchan and Dominique Sanchez, the loubards present at Renaud's 1980 concert visibly expressed their emotion upon discovering that they had fin-de-siècle counterparts – albeit imaginary ones – in the realist repertoire of Bruant and others (Séchan and Sanchez Reference Séchan and Sanchez1987, p. 13).

If the Bruant moment was part of an attempt to rescue the popular memories smothered by urban renewal, it also offered an antidote to the cultural cleansing operative within the show business industry. After having tamed and repackaged rock and roll in the safer form of yéyé during the 1960s, the industry promoted a new style of variétés (‘light entertainment’) in the early 1970s epitomised by the young, romantic crooner Mike Brant. What Coulomb and Varrod describe as ‘the “pretty boy” look, always clean-cut, a sparkling white smile, beautifully-styled long hair and an impeccable two-piece suit’ (1988, p. 54) was diametrically opposed to the personas of Bruant's successors.Footnote ²⁵ Of course Bruant's songs themselves naturally became a marketable product as the retro fashion took hold. However, this partly reflected a genuine thirst among young audiences for cultural traditions that offered more than just sentimental love songs.

While nostalgia can serve to challenge and engage authentically with the present, it also carries a number of risks. For Adrian Rifkin, chanson réaliste has an inherently nostalgic dimension based on a limited, repetitive stock of images and a notion of the ‘timeless popular’ that misrepresents the lower classes through the décor of crime and a ‘masculine topography’ of the city while blithely ignoring their real concerns (Rifkin Reference Rifkin1993, p. 176; Reference Rifkin, Rigby and Hewitt1991, p. 216; cf. Rifkin Reference Rifkin1987, pp. 121–55). One might add that nostalgia can quickly turn into the kind of kitsch exemplified by the mass-produced objects bearing Toulouse-Lautrec's images of Bruant that are still sold in the souvenir shops of Montmartre. Yet Bruant's successors, as we have seen, insisted that the originality and quality of his songwriting transcended these risks. Furthermore, Bruant's successors were not mere imitators; his songs were only part of their repertoire, which incorporated many other themes and styles. Béranger, for example, who disliked the ‘museification’ characteristic of the 1970s regionalist folk movement, was one of the first French artists to introduce hard rock into his compositions as a way of evoking the aggressiveness of contemporary city life (Guinchat Reference Guinchat1976, p. 48).

Another risk of nostalgia highlighted by Lebrun is its potential exclusion of social groups with a different heritage. Lebrun points out that the ‘neo-realist’ genre of the late 1980s and 1990s, notwithstanding its message of tolerance and its inclusion of musical elements from other countries, evoked a predominantly white French culture that had its origins in the colonial period and with which immigrants may have found it difficult to identify (Reference Lebrun2009, pp. 54–62). This also helps to explain why, as Kalifa reminds us, the gangster culture of the Belle Époque has been appropriated not only by the Left but also by the Far Right (Reference Kalifa2017, pp. 201–2). The question remains whether, during the 1968 years, Bruant's protagonists and the formal characteristics of his songs resonated on any level with the North-African immigrants or their children who had been lumped together with the blousons noirs and the unemployed as ‘the underworld’ in May 1968. Did Mouloudji's name and what his own mother disdainfully described as his ‘Arab features’ (Coquart Reference Coquart, Davisse and Aderhold2018) provide any kind of link between Bruant's songs and arabophone listeners?Footnote ²⁶ More broadly, the commonly held view of chanson réaliste and accordéon-musette as part of an essentially franchouillard (‘Frenchy’) culture has obscured the fact that the latter was originally a hybrid form composed of popular Auvergnat and Italian musical traditions and that the dancehalls where realist songs were played welcomed not just French workers but also their Italian, Polish and North African comrades (Coquart Reference Coquart, Davisse and Aderhold2018).

Finally, the distance that separated the fin de siècle from the 1968 years was in some ways less significant than one might assume. There were still people alive in the 1970s who had known or met Bruant, such as the cabaret performer Marcel de Barnault (Chancel Reference Chancel1970). When Pathé-Marconi reissued 28 of Bruant's original recordings in 1976, a reviewer from Le Figaro acclaimed his ‘picturesque slang, which has barely aged’ (26 October 1976).Footnote ²⁷ Mouloudji found it difficult to select the songs for his 1970 stage show, explaining that all of Bruant's songs remained ‘incredibly young in spirit’ (cited in Monteaux Reference Monteaux1969). The youthful energy and spontaneity which Bruant's successors brought to their performances also made his songs seem less old-fashioned. Mouloudji was described variously as ‘a fifty-year-old student’, ‘a master of youth’ and ‘the eternal kid with a mop of brown hair and a black jumper’ (Nussac Reference Nussac1973; Carrière Reference Carrière1974, Reference Carrière1975). While some critics focused on the nostalgic dimension of his repertoire or on the nostalgia of his older listeners – for Mouloudji's own songs of the 1950s as well as for Bruant – most emphasised either the quality of Bruant's œuvre or Mouloudji's ability to make it seem relevant. A review in France-Soir of his 1974 recital at Le Théâtre Présent insisted that Mouloudji's voice ‘isn't from the past: he sings without nostalgia’ (5 March 1974). Danièle Heymann described how, during the interval of Mouloudji's Reference Heymann1975 concert at L'Olympia, both the older and younger members of the audience shared a ‘curious, comforting feeling, not in the slightest bit retro, of having already lived and loved’ (1975).