Why do some French-speaking stars export themselves and others don’t?

For one Olympic evening, French-language songs resonated in every home on the planet. But the world obviously didn’t wait for this official ceremony on the banks of the Seine to discover Céline Dion in French or Aya Nakamura. The Quebecer signed the best-selling French-language album in the world (D’eux in 1995), which reached the top of the sales charts in non-French-speaking countries. As for Aya Nakamura, her songs have climbed the top of the charts in many countries. In the Netherlands and Romania, her single Djadja reached number one in sales, while in Hispanic America, such success for a song in French is unprecedented.

A French singer, no matter how successful he may be, rarely sees his hits exported naturally. This is mainly due to the language barrier. Once outside the French-speaking world, some French stars are completely anonymous. At the Cité internationale de la langue française (in Villers-Cotterêts) there is currently an exhibition on French-speaking singers who have exported themselves. Visitors may look for Johnny Halliday or Renaud, but they remain complete unknowns in most countries of the world. In fact, Jean-Jacques Goldman moved to the United Kingdom to live incognito: there, no one stops him in the street. On the contrary, other French singers seduce the whole world. In particular, female singers. They all have one thing in common: they project an idealized image of the French woman.

Aya Nakamura, the “black Marie-Antoinette”

Edith Piaf, Juliette Greco, Françoise Hardy yesterday, Patricia Kaas, Zaz and Iseult today, are champions of French-language song in the world. At first glance, nothing unites these women with different repertoires. And yet, in the eyes of a foreigner, they all embody a part of dream, of the sublime and of romanticism. They reflect the image of the elegant, free, even irreverent woman.

Let’s take Aya Nakamura, who some detractors accuse of not “singing French” because she uses a slang vocabulary that mixes various origins (coming from Roma, poukie means balance in slang). But at the same time, she colors her clips with an aesthetic of the most traditional France there is: that of the gilding and galleries of the Ancien Régime. Her clip Poukie was filmed in the Château de Fontainebleau where she wears haute couture dresses with a haughty look. She embodies the free and powerful woman. The journalist Bertrand Dicale, a specialist in French song, goes so far as to compare her to a “black Marie-Antoinette”.

As for Celine Dion, although she may be Americanized in certain aspects, she confided that French “is the language that flows in (his) veins“. She could have abandoned her mother tongue since she has English at her disposal, which is much more lucrative on the world stage. But she keeps her French, the language of her heart in which she sang the death of her husband (One more evening). Systematically, her songs declaim love, she exalts its romanticism with a voice that soars into the high notes. Even in front of an American audience, she sings in French, this language in which love rhymes with always. In this, she follows in the footsteps of Piaf and Brel, texts that she takes up in her mouth with disconcerting ease, as if they had been written for her. Finally, she too has become a fashion icon, she imposes her choices and conveys a part of the dream in the French language.