Popular Songs

French popular song grew out of an anonymous oral tradition going back to the troubadours of the middle Ages. But the phenomenon of named individuals singing and writing songs, and of people coming together in specific places to hear them, is much more recent and brought dramatic change. As the chanson specialist Louis-Jean Calved notes, the song form has always evolved in keeping with the places in which songs have been performed.8Calvet traces this process back to 1734 with the beginning of the châteaux, song clubs which met in back rooms of up market restaurants where members would eat, drink and sing topical satires set to familiar melodies. The working-class equivalents were the coquettes, which developed after the restoration of the monarchy in 1815 and of which there were several hundred in Paris by the mid-1800s. The coquettes too were clubs for amateur singers and songsmiths, who met regularly in wine shops, cafés and drinking houses to sing either their members’ latest creations (again using existing melodies) or the songs of well-known singers like be ranger (1780–1857). Initially associated with popular opposition to the restoration of the monarchy in 1815,the coquettes were ideal sites for agents provocateurs to entrap dissident, like La Society des patriots, were even started up by police informers for that purpose.9 Later, under the July Monarchy of 1830, the politics of the coquettes became republican, though regular police harassment together with public demand for entertainment and a quiet life meant that many were involved in nothing more seditious than social drinking and bawdy singing. Nevertheless, the oppositional culture of the go-getter was to produce two of the best-known political lyricists of the nineteenth century: who wrote the words of the ‘International’, and Jean-Baptist Clement (1836–1903), who in 1867 penned the lyric of the famously Temps des cerise’s’ (The Time of Cherries), which was to become associated with the popular uprising of the Paris Commune of 1871, in which both writers took part. The coquettes in fact became cradles of class consciousness and socialism, where disaffected workers, artisans and traders ‘learnt to suffer and hate together'.