(Paris) The lost soul, relatives and admirers of the French singer Françoise Hardy gathered Thursday at the Père-Lachaise cemetery in Paris for the farewell ceremony to one of the last icons of the sixties, who died at the age of 80 .
Thomas Dutronc, the son of Françoise Hardy and singer-songwriter Jacques Dutronc, arrived shortly before 3 p.m. local time under the dome of the Crematorium, where the artist’s family and friends had gathered.
Also present were her artistic family, the singers Étienne Daho, Julien Clerc, Laurent Voulzy, Sheila, Dave, Salvatore Adamo, as well as the director François Ozon, who used several of the singer’s tunes in his films.
The artist with his androgynous physique and assumed melancholy conquered the Anglo-Saxon public in the 1960s, catching the eye of Mick Jagger and Bob Dylan. She was also the only Frenchwoman in the ranking of the 200 best singers of all time published by the American magazine Rolling Stone in 2023.
On Thursday, former President Nicolas Sarkozy and his wife Carla attended the ceremony at Père-Lachaise, as did Culture Minister Rachida Dati and the wife of the French head of state, Brigitte Macron, who was boo, noted an AFP journalist.
Hundreds of onlookers came to pay tribute to the woman whose successes Tous les enfants et les femmes – which she had written and composed, sold more than two million copies – or Comment te dire adieu, her standard from 1968, have rocked their adolescence.
“She has marked our lives, from the 1960s to today,” Jean-Charles, a 70-year-old Parisian retiree with a Basque beret on his head, told AFP. “With his texts, we could take the time to settle down and live.”
“She represents all of my youth, she was a discreet personality, far from the buzz, a very beautiful woman compared to the bimbos of today,” says Houria, a 71-year-old Parisian.
Annie was not born in 1962 when All the Boys and Girls was released, but she is here to pay tribute to the woman who reminds her of her mother – who always listened to her songs.
“I also came for the whole Dutronc family”, Thomas and Jacques, the husband of Françoise Hardy from whom she had been separated for more than thirty years, but not divorced, adds this civil servant, who works nights and went to the Père-Lachaise cemetery before taking up his post.
The singer of So Many Beautiful Things had expressed the wish to be “cremated in privacy and without religious ceremony”, according to the weekly Paris Match, and buried in Corsica, more precisely in Monticello, where Jacques Dutronc lives.
The disappearance of Françoise Hardy, who had fought against cancer which appeared in 2004, comes almost a year after that of the French’s favorite Englishwoman, Jane Birkin, another emblematic figure of the sixties who died in July 2023.