Edith Piaf Meet the Author

Now on BBC News, it's time for Meet the Author.

A century ago this week, the legendary French singer

Edith Piaf was born.

David Looseley is Professor of Contemporary French Culture

at the University of Leeds and a man fascinated not only by Piaf

the singer and performer, but by Piaf the emblem

of French identity.

In Edith Piaf A Cultural History, he traces with an academic's rigour

the development of the Piaf legend - much of it invented by Piaf herself

- and considers what it tells us about an extraordinary woman,

but also about France.

David Looseley, all singers construct a performance.

It's what they have to do.

But Edith Piaf seems to have gone much further.

She seems to have constructed almost an entire life?

Yes, but I think what she's really constructed is a life in song.

And what I mean by that is that she chose her songs

from the very beginning to match her life, but also then

narrated her own life to match her songs.

So let's take one simple example of that, a song,

a very famous song with which she was associated called

Mon Legionnaire, which is the story of a young woman who falls

for a legionnaire, and the legionnaire goes off

to North Africa or wherever and gets killed.

MUSIC PLAYS: "Mon Legionnaire" by Edith Piaf.

She was always rather coy about whether that was autobiographical.

Presumably it wasn't, because the song was originally

written for someone else to sing?

Exactly, yes.

But when she found out that somebody else had sung it first,

or somebody else was, yeah, either sung it first

or was going to sing it, she was really cross,

because she said, "This is my song, this is a song about me

and it's my legionnaire."

And had she come to believe that, even if it wasn't strictly true,

do you think?

Was she so wrapped up in her creation of herself

that she believed her own myth?

I think that's a really interesting point, and a really good point,

that I think she, in a sense, did come to believe her own myths.

She famously had a very difficult childhood.

Her mother was a street singer, her father was a circus performer,

she was born in difficult circumstances, sent away to live

with her grandmother in the country, who ran a brothel, among

all these prostitutes.

Came back and became a street singer herself.

Now, her style, her performance style, derives, presumably,

from that beginning?

Basically, she stood there and she belted it out

with this extraordinary voice?

Yeah.

But there are occasions when she did more than merely just stand there,

there was one particular song which you wrote about in the book

called L'Accordioniste, which is the story of a fling

with an accordion player.

MUSIC PLAYS: "L'Accordioniste" by Edith Piaf.

She is doing something rather unusual for her in that

song, isn't she?

Yes, there is a bit of a conflict between how people described her

concerts in, say, the 40s and 50s particularly,

and the filmed footage.

And they normally said that she stood there motionless,

or an occasional hand movement but, yes, in The Accordionist,

she uses her hands more and she dramatises the song right up

until the very last verse.

There's a wonderful recording she made with a male cappella

group called Les Compagnons de la Chanson very soon after the end

of the war, which is, as I understand it, a song

about a peasant whose life is admirable because,

actually, nothing happens to him and he never moves away.

Stunningly uneventful, yes.

Exactly.

MUSIC PLAYS: "Les Trois Cloches" by Edith Piaf and Les Compagnons

de la Chanson.

During the 40s and 50s, her reputation grew.

She travelled to America where she was a success.

Yeah.

But at the same time, as a result of drink and drugs

and all the rest of it, her health started to fail,

and she eventually died in 1964.

63.

63, at the age of 47.

Her funeral was extraordinary, enormous.

Thousands came.

Why?

What had she come to mean at this stage?

That's a good question.

It was an extraordinary event.

Not quite as extraordinary as the death of Diana,

but it was in that kind of direction, with public weeping

and so on.

I think, by then, she had, on the one hand, you know,

fairly understandably, she had come to represent people's nostalgia.

You know, by 1963, people of a certain age were already

looking back to the war with a sense of pain but also nostalgia.

And I think she represented that.

But, by then, she'd also come to be connected via the notion

of la Chanson Francaise, this French chanson, which...

I always use the word chanson in the book because it means

something different from song.

So the idea of this French chanson as being something intrinsically

French which the French did very well and which somehow expressed

a deep cultural identity, that's what she'd started to mean

by the time that she died.

So let's finish with a Piaf song, a song of defiance which was written

and performed in the last years of her life, Je Ne Regrette Rien.

What does this signify, do you think?

Well, the song is strange in the sense that not a lot

of non-French speakers realise that the song is not a kind

of Frank Sinatra My Way song, "I'm at the end of my life

and I'm looking back."

At end of the song she says, "I'm being born again

because I've found a new lover."

So there is actually an optimistic theme beyond the theme

of "I regret nothing."

# Non, rien de rien.

# Non, je ne regrette rien.

So it's that intrinsic sense of defiance, "I am who I am,

and you may have beaten me on the surface, but I've lost

a battle, I haven't lost the war."

# Non, rien de rien.

# Non, je ne regrette rien.

# C'est paye, balaye, oublie.

# Ca commence avec toi.

Good evening.

It looks like December is so far continuing where November

left off.

Once again, this month so far, sunshine has been in short