Popular Song

For many centuries poetry and song were closely related in France [see Lyric Poetry, I; Words And Music]. From the 17th c., however, there has been a tendency to separate the literary from the oral or popular. While various types of ‘chanson’ have remained in the standard repertoire of lyric poets, song has therefore been given a minor place in literature. Nevertheless, there have at all times been those who have looked to the popular song tradition for a renewal of life and feeling, from Alceste in Molière's Misanthrope to Nerval in his Chansons et légendes du Valois. The vogue of folklore was particularly strong in the Romantic period. What is more, the song-writer Béranger was acclaimed in his time (for instance by Stendhal) as France's greatest poet, and since then many poets (e.g. Hugo, Aragon) have themselves written songs, appealing to a less narrow audience than the usual poetry-reading public. Song deserves to be considered an integral and important part of French literature.

Many of the best popular songs are anonymous, but no scholars would now subscribe to the German Romantic view of the folk-song issuing spontaneously from the unspoilt Volk, and radically different from the productions of courtly or urban civilization. The origins and trajectories of songs are complex, involving a to-and-fro between high and popular culture. From the earliest times one finds pastiches of popular song, from the 13th-c. chansons de toile to the 18th-c. romances of writers such as Moncrif and Arnaud Berquin. A considerable part was played in the diffusion of such songs by the urban chansonniers (e.g. the singers on the Pont-Neuf in Paris), by popular entertainments such as the opéra-comique, and by the colporteurs who carried broadsheets around the villages. Many of the most widely known songs have quite recent urban origins: ‘Au clair de la lune’ and ‘Le bon roi Dagobert’ both originate in Paris in the 1780s.

Even so, the folk-songs which were collected by the folklorists of the 19th c. were predominantly rural (as was the French population) and they were above all transmitted orally. Like folk-tales, they were therefore liable to constant modification, so that, whatever their ultimate origin, they were the result of a kind of collective creation. There is no standard version of such songs. Similarly, the same song might be sung to different tunes, and above all the same tune could be endlessly reused for any number of songs; this is the basis of the vaudeville.

Such folk-songs belong to different types. The complaintes are narrative songs with a strong element of dialogue, comparable to English or German ballads; the most famous is ‘Le Roi Renaud’, a tragic tale sung to a tune of apparently Gregorian origin. Some complaintes refer to historical events, e.g. the death of Mandrin. Noëls are songs in honour of Christ's birth; like the Protestant versions of the psalms or the Catholic cantiques, these were written by the literate to encourage popular piety. Then there are drinking songs and love songs, including chansons de mal-mariée, songs of work, and all kinds of humorous songs. A particularly important place in the mental world of all French people is held by children's songs; with the exception of such things as counting rhymes (comptines), these were rarely meant for children from the outset; ‘Il était un petit navire’, for instance, was a sailor's song which was subsequently given a humourous form.

The songs of the peasants had long been appreciated and collected by connoisseurs, but the massive and systematic work of folklorists in this domain only began in the second half of the 19th c. This was partly due to Romantic ideology; it also had the effect of drawing attention away from the other main type of popular song, the generally urban song of political protest. This had flourished at all periods, particularly times of unrest such as the Wars of Religion and the Fronde [see Mazarinades]. It included satirical attacks on powerful figures and songs deploring the hardships endured by the poor, including military service. The Revolution saw a great wave of political songs of all tendencies. Some of these were genuinely popular creations; the ‘çaira’ and the ‘Carmagnole’, sung to dance tunes, were the work of unknown authors, and were subject to constant alterations and additions. Others, such as ‘La Mort de Marat’, ‘Le Chant du départ’, or the ‘Hymne à l'Être Suprême’, are songs written for propaganda purposes, then adopted by a popular audience. The ‘Marseillaise’ of Rouget de l'Isle, endlessly imitated and adapted, is the most famous of these.

The political song throve in the 19th c., being used to express opposition to governments and marking the successive revolutionary movements of 1830, 1848, and 1871. The master of the genre was Béranger, followed by such figures as Dupont, Clément, and Charles Gille, and imitated by the Hugo of the Chansons des rues et des bois. Their songs were performed in cabarets such as Le Caveau and the more working-class singing societies known as goguettes. The latter were shut down in 1852 but, later in the Second Empire and during the Commune of 1871, song regained its political function. From about this period there is a growing tendency towards the commercialization of popular song in the music-halls, cafés-concerts, and the like, but in the 20th c. song has continued to be used as propaganda by bodies such as the Communist Party and the Catholic Church. During World War II, ‘Maréchal, nous voilà!’ drummed up support for Pétain, while the ‘Chant des partisans’ became the marching-song of the Resistance [see Occupation And Resistance]. A more detailed view of popular song in the 20th c. is given under chanson française.

[Peter France]

Bibliography

• H. Davenson, Le Livre des chansons (1946)
• P. Barbier and F. Vernillat, Histoire de France par les chansons, 8 vols. (1956-61)
• D. Rieger (ed.), La Chanson française et son histoire (1988)

The popular song in early modern Europe was a melody, usually widely known in society, that was set to a poetic text and communicated either in private or public performance or in print. The melodies had origins variously in folk music, tavern singing, comic opera, or vaudeville, all-sung opera, or even hymn singing. In fact, they moved back and forth between such contexts, being set to new words. In this period "vaudeville" had different meanings in different countries, referring to courtly songs in France and "country" ballad or song in England.

Here "popular" should be taken to mean "general" culture, part of what almost everyone was assumed to know, rather than an idiom that was distinctive of the lower classes or was seen on a lesser cultural level.

In such countries as France, England, and Germany, popular songs were disseminated during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries chiefly by men who both sang and sold them in fairs, most notably on the Pont-Neuf in Paris. The chansonnières were part of the charlatans, unlicensed trades such as jugglers, magicians, or vendors of medical or cosmetic items. Essential to the chansonnières' business was the maintenance of a wide network of connections and news by which to write ballads on topics of general interest. They also formed part of small companies that put on skits in fairs. Editions of songs, which were numerous beginning in the early seventeenth century, became closely linked with political dispute, as in the Recueil general des chansons de la Fronde (General collection of songs of the Fronde) of 1649.

In the early eighteenth century the song became institutionalized within the musical theater known variously as opera buffa, opéra comique, vaudeville, Singspiel, and what was called either English or ballad opera. Their productions combined songs with a spoken text, the latter usually linked to the former in mood rather than plot line. The same songs were attached to dramas in the licensed theaters; by 1700 London playwrights had become concerned that much of the public went to Drury Lane more for the songs than the plays. In both Paris and Vienna some works in these idioms—most notably Die Entführing aus dem Serail and Die Zauberflöte by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756–1791) and Le Déserteur by Pierre-Alexandre Monsigny (1729–1817)—were by 1789 thought to stand on a level of sophistication equal to that of all-sung opera.

Writing texts for songs became an extremely important aspect of both amusement and politics during the eighteenth century. Robert Darnton shows that chansons evolved in a process of successive, collective authorship that was deeply rooted in aspects of sociability. It served as a central means by which news was spread, became interpreted, and thereby influenced public life anew. A leading aficionado of chansons was Jean-Frédéric Phélypeaux, comte de Maurepas (1701–1781), minister to Louis XV; his collection was published in Émile Raunié's Chansonnier historique du XVIIIe siècle (1879–1884). Some men of letters, most notably Charles Collé (1709–1783), made a career out of writing chansons.

By 1750 editions of the songs in a well-known work that had been done by a famous singer became a major commercial component of music publishing. Tendencies of mass marketing can be detected by 1800 in the production of songs designed to be easy to appreciate by the expanding ranks of people playing and singing at home. Publishers in Britain and Germany pressured composers to write songs on supposedly Irish or Scottish themes that came to be seen as mere fashion and hype in some quarters.

Bibliography

Darnton, Robert. "An Early Information Society: News and the Media in Eighteenth-Century Paris." American Historical Review 105 (2000): 1–35.

Duneton, Claude. Histoire de la chanson française. Vol. 1, Des origins à 1780. Paris, 1998.

Schwab, H. W. Sangbarkeit, Popularität und Kunstlied Studien: Zu Lied und Liedästhetik der mittleren Goethezeit. Regensburg, 1965.

—WILLIAM WEBER