Bousquet, Papon, and Resistence Fighters: The tale of Jane Birkin’s favourite French protest song
Given that most of her artistic output was in the French language, it’s understandable that a lot of people assume that singer, actor and fashion designer Jane Birkin hailed from the country she was so strongly associated with.
However, despite her connection to ‘l’hexagone’, Birkin was a London-born performer who just happened to find success in mainland Europe, and who would become known for her ‘chansons pop’ along with her frequent collaborations and 12-year marriage to Serge Gainsbourg.
Her merging of both British and French culture from the ‘60s onwards was a boundary-breaking moment in the popular culture of both countries, and while some may consider the two nations to be distinct in the ways they present themselves creatively, Birkin always managed to inject a slight Britishness into her French-language work, causing a greater deal of exposure for the music of each respective country on foreign shores.
Perhaps best known for the explicit sexual content of controversy-courting single ‘Je t’aime… moi non plus’ that she recorded with Gainsbourg, Birkin’s French-language work is far more extensive than this horny chart-topper, and despite hailing from Britain, many of her greatest influences happened to also be delivered in the French tongue.
A fan of several other French stars such as Jacques Dutronc, Françoise Hardy and Léo Ferré, Birkin regularly spoke of her admiration for the work that the artists of her adopted homeland produced, but one song in particular always stood out to her as being a perfect embodiment of French identity, their allegiance to the motto of “liberté, egalité, fraternité” (‘freedom, equality, brotherhood’), and their dedication to standing up for what they believe in.
Written several years after the peak of her career in 1998, the song that Birkin believes is the finest ever French protest song is Alain Bashung’s ‘La Nuit Je Mens’, which literally translates as ‘At Night I Lie’, and explores the stories of resistance fighters who battled for freedom against the Nazi occupation of Vichy during the Second World War, which she admitted was one of her favourite songs of all time during an interview with Vogue in 2018.
Bashung apparently was inspired by hearing the accounts of René Bousquet and Maurice Papon, the former generals who oversaw the police force during the period of occupation and were convicted of being Nazi co-conspirators who committed crimes against humanity in their authorisation of the deportation of Jewish citizens in Bordeaux. While the song doesn’t necessarily take a stance against the actions of the two generals, it does make several explicit references to the resistance against their actions, with the central character seemingly boasting to a young woman who he is trying to charm that he was there in Vichy at the time of the resistance.
However, what the protagonist of the song labours over most is the fact that he has to live with the atrocities that he witnessed, with him using many phrases to suggest that he is still haunted by his experiences. “Je m’en lave les mains” means that the narrator “washes his hands” of the past, while “j’ai dans les bottes des montagnes de questions,” meaning “in my boots I have a mountain of questions,” refers to how he carries around the burden of having been involved with him daily despite trying to clear it from his mind.
It’s a powerful song, and perhaps even more so for anyone with a knowledge of everything France had to endure during the period, and for Birkin to name it as one of her favourite French-language songs of all time is huge praise for Bashung, a much-celebrated songwriter from the nation’s history.
