Unsurprisingly, the country that produced Debussy, foie gras and the Impressionists spoils us for choice when it comes to singers. But who to include on the top ten list? Here are our choices for best and most famous French singers of all time – but feel free to differ...
Best French singers of all time
Édith Piaf
Édith Piaf’s is not the happiest of stories. Abandoned at birth by her mother, the French crooner spent much of her youth growing up in a brothel. At 17 she had a child out of wedlock and went on to develop various drug and alcohol dependencies as well as a string of failed romances. These included the love of her life: the married French boxer, Marcel Cerdan, with whom she had a year-long affair before he was killed in a plane crash en route to visit her.
For all that, though, Piaf was probably the most legendary French singer of all time, whose greatest hits, among them ‘Je ne regrette rien’; ‘La vie en rose’ and ‘Hymne à l’amour' are as powerful and emblematic of French culture now, 60 years after her death, as they ever were.
Serge Gainsbourg
Born as Lucien Ginsburg, the son of Jewish emigrants of Turkish, Russian and Ukrainian origin, Gainsbourg grew up profoundly affected by the occupation of France by Germany during World War II. He escaped with his family to the zone libre under the administration of the collaborationist Vichy government but still suffered from anti-semitic policies.
Later, Gainsbourg was able to find an artistic outlet for his haunting memories, developing a reputation for sticking two fingers up at the artistic establishment. Among his most provocative releases was ‘Je t’aime, moi non plus’ (‘I love you…me neither’, which he recorded with his then-partner: the English-French actress and singer Jane Birkin (1946-2023).
Some listeners speculated that the pair had actually recorded themselves having sex, to which Gainsbourg retorted: ‘Thank goodness it wasn't, otherwise I hope it would have been a long-playing record.' He is remembered now as one of the most important, most subversive figures in 20th-century French pop.
Philippe Jaroussky
Although he began his career on the violin, it was as one of the world’s leading countertenors that Philippe Jaroussky would become known. The great grandson of a Russian émigré who fled the Bolshevik Revolution, Jaroussky was not born to a musical family. His musical talent was discovered at school, and he went on to develop it as a student at the Conservatoire de Paris, before going on to co-found the ensemble Artaserse in 2002. Since then he has attracted a cult following thanks to the beauty of his light, bright soprano sound.
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Sandrine Piau
Sandrine Piau, the early music soprano best known as a Handel interpreter, has come a long way since she first embarked on a musical career.
Her first instrument was the harp, which she studied at the Conservatoire de Paris; at the time she rarely listened to Baroque music at all. Still, in order to earn some cash, she sang in Philippe Herreweghe’s Baroque choir.
One day she met a flautist who said: “‘I know you’re earning money through singing, Sandrine, and there’s a conductor here who runs a class you might want to apply for – if he likes what you do, he might get you more work!”. That conductor was William Christie, who ‘was the first to tell me: “If you leave the harp behind, you will be a singer with me,”’ as Piau later recalled in an interview with The Arts Desk. She went on to become one of the most feted coloratura sopranos in the world.
Véronique Gens
While she established her reputation as a specialist in Baroque repertoire, Véronique Gens is now considered one of the foremost Mozart performers. Throughout the transition, however, there has been a constant: the austere beauty of her voice.
This is a soprano who truly lives by the guiding principle of less is more, who can convey more with a pure, unadorned tone than many have with multiple layers of vocal trimmings. Need convincing? Just watch this clip of her singing …….
Natalie Dessay
As a child she had intended to be an actress. Then Natalie Dessay took up singing in order to become one. ‘I became an opera singer so that I could act, while singing of course. But acting is my real passion, being an actress is what really interests me,’ she said in a 2018 interview.
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The Lyon-born singer went on to become one of the most theatrically compelling opera stars in the world. Since retiring from the opera stage in 2013, however, she has returned to her first love of acting, often appearing in psychologically meaty stage productions, not least Legend of a Life - a play by the 20th-century Austrian writer Stefan Zweig. She also gives recitals of classical music, jazz and chanson, or French art song.
Sabine Devielhe
With a similarly maverick quality and quirky intelligence at odds with received notions of coloratura sopranos, Sabine Devielhe is often touted as a successor to Natalie Dessay.
Devielhe was born in Ifs, northwestern France, to a non-musical family, and initially followed an academic path, studying for a diploma in musicology and ethnomusicology at the University of Rennes 2. In parallel with her studies, however, she joined the choir of the Opéra de Rennes, participating as a chorister in a production of Wagner's The Flying Dutchman in 2002, before going on to become a soloist.
She is now widely praised for the radiance and sensuality of her voice, which has found a comfortable home in repertoire ranging from Rameau to Richard Strauss.
Most famous French singers: Trenet, Aznavour, Gréco
Charles Trenet
Who doesn’t love a bit of Charles Trenet? His sunny, accordion-soaked catalogue of songs - numbering almost 1,000 - is synonymous with idealised notions of French culture, and rarely fails to lift the spirits.
Trenet's own story, however, does contain some thorns. Sent, aged seven, to boarding school in Béziers after his parents divorced, he developed his artistic talents during a convalescence from typhoid fever. Like many artists during World War II, he chose to entertain the occupying forces rather than sacrifice his career.
Was he a collaborator? The wave of official trials that followed the Liberation of France and the fall of the Vichy Régime, resulted in a mere reprimand to Trenet without any other consequences. He went on to make a successful career in the US, where he met Louis Armstrong and befriended Charlie Chaplin. Among his many hit songs, the best known is ‘La mer’, ‘Boum!’, ‘Que reste-t-il de nos amours?’ and ‘Douce France.’
Charles Aznavour
Variously described as France’s Frank Sinatra, and as a French pop deity, Charles Aznavour was admired by all the great and good, including Frank Sinatra, Celine Dion, Édith Piaf and Liza Minnelli, with whom he performed and who once said of him: “he changed my entire life.” Undeniably, and deservedlyu, one of the most famous French singers in the history of French song.
Aznavour was born in Paris into an artistic family of Armenian ancestry, and grew up surrounded by music: his father, the son of a cook of Tsar Nicholas II, sang in restaurants in France before establishing a restaurant specialising in food from the Caucasus.
It didn’t take the young Aznavour long to get a foothold in the music industry, opening for Piaf during the early stages of his career. He went on to record more than 1,200 songs, many of them about the melancholy of failed love.
‘Before Aznavour, despair was unpopular,’ the French director Jean Cocteau once said. Many have referred to him as the most famous Armenian of all time.
Juliette Gréco
For all that she lived a long and colourful life (she died in 2020 aged 93), Juliette Gréco’s story was not always the happiest. Raised by her maternal grandparents in Bordeaux with her older sister Charlotte, she had a complicated relationship with her mother, who allegedly scarred her with comments such as ‘"You ain't my daughter. You're the child of rape”.
Active in the Resistance during World War II, Greco was captured and tortured by the Gestapo, then imprisoned in Fresnes Prison in September 1943. Post-war she attended acting classes, before embarking on a career as an actress and popular singer.
It was a career that would bring her multiple awards and accolades, making her one of the most famous French singers of all time. It would also see her through multiple love affairs (not least with the jazz legend Miles Davis), three rhinoplasties and a suicide attempt in the 1960s. Such was the aura she generated that even John Lennon said of her: ‘I'd always had a fantasy about a woman who would be a beautiful, intelligent, dark-haired, high-cheek-boned, free-spirited artist à la Juliette Gréco.'
