PWhether to rejoice or be saddened, the announcement of Michel Sardou’s retirement has been widely commented on. At the end of March, the singer bowed out on stage, even if it is a safe bet that, for a long, long, long time, his songs will still be heard in the streets. The chroniclers of World who followed this fifty-year career have continued to oscillate between admiration for the popular artist and annoyance in the face of the populist juggernaut.
On October 14, 1970, Claude Sarraute cannot hide his enthusiasm for the man who achieved notoriety at the start of the decade. He has just recorded a first album whose title seems a manifesto of his future career: I live in France. The journalist from World found in the young man all at once “the stuff, the punch, the register, the chest and the heart”. She continues: “The Popular Balls, America, America, And die of pleasure are tunes that catch, that cling, that put nightingales in your head and ants in your legs. Dark hair and matching gaze, clenched fists raised high, fingers spread in the shape of a V, he fights the good fight, and the victories he accumulates are all to our glory. »
She drove the golden nail home on November 6, 1971: “Michel Sardou, it’s you, it’s me, it’s him, it’s Mr. Everyman as defined, day after day, by opinion polls. He lives in France, and France is not as bad as you think. (…) Michel Sardou’s success is less a matter of criticism than of sociological study. In the ready-to-wear verses imported from abroad, his own have a taste of the land or rather of the sidewalk, a taste of “Saturday evening after the turbin” and “Sunday morning after love”. »
“An original inspiration”
On January 3, 1975, Claude Fléouter was no less excited. “Solidly linked to a French tradition of popular song, Michel Sardou nevertheless has an original inspiration, and his songs (…) know how to tell a story which is a bit like that of ordinary people established in life or who are settling into it, who have their singularity, their complexity, their richness too, but whose impulses remain unfinished. »
On October 29, 1976, the journalist could only note that the character, like his left-wing counterpart, Maxime Le Forestier, “provokes real hatred from certain people”. And point “the right-thinking people who once and for all stick a vengeful label on the singer’s back”. “It was thus decided that Michel Sardou was the “cantor of the silent majority””, notes Claude Fléouter, who prefers to see “an authentically popular and modern singer who, seemingly nothing, brings with him a breath of warmth, a universe where tears and hopes, emotion and a certain irony blend together.”
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