Throughout a course on 20th-century and contemporary France, I’ve been incorporating popular songs into our analysis of what it means to be French, from the post-war period to the present day. I’ve used music in a variety of ways: comparing two songs from the same period, or from vastly different periods (1945 and 1975,...Read more »
Michel Fugain’s 1972 song “Une Belle Histoire” has become a classic ballad of summer vacation, travel, and youth. The musical style is pretty dated, but that only adds to the kitchy fun of the song. It also happens to use several forms of the past tense, so I created one of my signature fill-in-the-blanks...Read more »
I’m teaching a summer course at the moment, and while the students are quite interested in Rodenbach’s dark novel, sometimes the sun and heat call for a quick break from the novel’s grey and foreboding atmosphere. Charles Trenet’s “La Mer” is a classic, with its nostalgic 1940s sound that builds to a final stanza...Read more »
Most students will recognize the melody of “Comme d’habitude” because it is that of “My Way,” but few will know that the song made famous by Sinatra is actually a remake of the French song by Claude François. The original song shares no lyrical content with the English version: it’s a song about one...Read more »
You can use any French song to create some sort of grammar, vocabulary, or culture lesson. The song “Octobre” by Francis Cabrel lends itself particularly well to a review of the futur simple. About half of the lines of the text contain a verb in the future, and many of them are irregular. The...Read more »
