There death of Françoise Hardy was announced on the Instagram profile with the sweetest phrase that her son Thomas Dutronc could choose: “Maman est partie…”, mother has left. The consolatory euphemism chosen by those who suffer from the loss of a parent because it suggests a temporary departure, sooner or later we will see each other again. Françoise Hardy she was the only Frenchwoman in the ranking of the 200 best singers of all time Rolling Stone USA. She was born in Paris on 17 January 1944 under German bombing, in the same hospital on the rue des Martyrs where another legend of French music, Johnny Hallyday, was born a few weeks earlier. She had grown up in a modest two-room apartment in 9th arrondissement of Paris, with her accountant mother Madeleine and her younger sister Michèle, born a year after her, with whom she shared the only bedroom while her mother slept in the living room. She never lived with her father, the wealthy bourgeois Étienne Dillard, a resistance fighter later deported to Dachau, who would only recognize her and her sister when they grew up. He was in fact married to another woman and raised two families, although he often forgot about the “illegitimate” one, leaving poor Madeleine Hardy and her daughters in serious economic difficulty. Perhaps because they resented the clandestinity with which she and her sister were brought into the world, little Françoise was mistreated by her grandmother and ignored by her grandfather who spoke to her only once in her entire life, when she was starting to be famous. Hardy will recount that in the days when her mother had to leave her and her little sister with her grandparents, she read a lot and loved watching TV, but she suffered from night terrors and often ran away from their house to walk back to the two-room apartment of the 9th arrondissement. Her father enrolled her in a good religious school, but he often forgot to pay her tuition, and she Françoise felt embarrassed by the reminders from her management. Furthermore, the other girls didn’t bond with her because she was the daughter of a “single mother” and didn’t dress as luxuriously as them. Her entire childhood was a push and pull between economic difficulties and moments in which her father remembered the existence of her and her little sister, and took care of them generously. Every summer the girls were sent on the Orient-Express to Austria, to the home of a lady with eight children who didn’t speak a word of French, to force them to learn German. Here, however, the adolescent Françoise discovered the works of Simone de Beauvoir in the library, which she borrowed and devoured. She also listened to a lot of music, all day, ever since her mother bought a radio in the early 1960s.
Françoise Madeleine Hardy in the 1960s, at the beginning of her career.
One day, turning the frequency knob, Françoise intercepts an English radio station and hears a rock and roll song for the first time. She remains bewitched by Elvis Presley, Cliff Richard, Brenda Lee. She starts buying records and soon has such sophisticated tastes that shops often don’t know the songs she asks for. When she graduates from high school at 16, and her parents ask her what she wants as a gift, she chooses a guitar. She begins to study self-taught, she dreams of becoming a musician. While she studies literature at university, she reads on France Soir the advertisement of a record company looking for young singers and booking an audition. She does well, but isn’t chosen. Encouraged, she decides to attend the Petit Conservatoire de la chanson in Mireille, to improve her skills. Only two years later she took another audition at Vogue Records, which already had her contemporary Johnny Hallyday under contract and wanted to replicate his success with a female artist. After some auditions in which she tweaks her performances from time to time following the advice of the record companies, she is finally asked to summon her parents to sign the contract. Françoise Hardy she will remember all her life the happiness she felt when she left the record company offices at 54 rue d’Hauteville. She felt like she was walking on a cloud and she wanted to kiss everyone who passed by. The record companies began the campaign for its launch, and it boomed on TV on 28 October 1962, the evening in which the French awaited the results of the referendum on the election of the President of the Republic by universal suffrage. In one of the waiting interludes she performs with All boys and girlsand in the following days, the song explodes in the charts and is the most popular in the jukebox. Paris Match he dedicated the cover to her in one of the January 1963 issues, indicating her as the new idol of young people, underlining her talent as a composer. Her career takes off. From that moment on, everyone wants her, even the director Roger Vadim who makes her debut in the cinema. Her songs, which draw inspiration from the suffering of her feelings, are all great successes, so much so that in November 1963, less than a year after that cover, she already performed for eight weeks at the Olympia in Paris, the temple of French music. Her fame crosses borders, she becomes a star throughout Europe, and then Japan and the United States. In Italy her songs are reinterpreted in Italian. Her image, whose strong points are miniskirts, knee-high boots and thick bangs, is as captivating as her music. The great French couturiers such as André Courrèges, Yves Saint Laurent and Paco Rabanne want you to wear their clothes. Rabanne has her wear what has been called “the most expensive minidress in the world” made of gold plates studded with diamonds, and Marc Bohan also creates a dress for her.
Françoise Hardy in 1968 with the gold minidress by Paco Rabanne, accompanied by Salvador Dalì.
With fabulous earnings, Françoise Hardy he buys land in Corsica where he has a house built. In 1966 she also took part in the Sanremo Festival together with Edoardo Vianello, with the song tell me about you. In 1968 she moved away from Paris, frightened by the student revolts, and retired to Corsica with her partner Jacques Dutronc with whom she married in 1981. That year she faced a legal dispute with the record company and took the opportunity to give a setback to tours. In fact, she later confessed that she suffered a lot from stage fright and suffered from too much travel. Calmly, she also dedicated herself to the study of psychology and astrology. Her life is already dotted with a series of unrepeatable successes, some of her songs such as Mon amie la rose And Comment te say adieu, written by Serge Gainsbourg, will become timeless classics. In 1969, after losing the rights to the songs composed between 1962 and 1967, he founded his own record companies Hypopotam And Kundalini. He writes less, to dedicate himself to his son Thomas, and dedicates himself more and more to astrology, and then to graphology. She retired in 1988, after a twenty-six year career, releasing her last album Décalages, which immediately went gold. He changed his mind in 1994, signed a contract with Virgin and released a new album in 1996 entitled Le Danger. Then, again, in 2000, she recorded the song Clair-obscur, accompanied on the guitar by her son with whom she later also performed duets. In 2003 you also published an astrology book, which achieved good sales success. Meanwhile, the French press changes her name, from “idol” to “icon”. And invariably, in 2007 Françoise Hardy also published her memoir, Le désespoir des singes et autres trifles (The desperation of the monkeys and other nonsense). Meanwhile, cancer had already appeared in her life in 2004, reappearing in various forms after treatment, the latest in the larynx, making her deaf in one ear, a mocking retaliation for a singer. Her pain scared her a lot, she had also seen her mother slowly waste away from ALS, and in 2019 she invoked the right to euthanasia. In his latest interview with Paris Matchin 2023, she said she wanted to “leave quickly and quickly”, without suffering any longer. Death satisfied her on 11 June 2024 while she was in Paris. She was 80 years old and no one will ever collect her artistic legacy.
