Journal of Popular Film and Television

ISSN: 0195-6051 (Print) 1930-6458 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/vjpf20

“Love Has a History”: France, Film, and Edith Piaf

Peter Baxter

To cite this article: Peter Baxter (2015) “Love Has a History”: France, Film, and Edith Piaf,
Journal of Popular Film and Television, 43:4, 212-219, DOI: 10.1080/01956051.2015.1043721

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01956051.2015.1043721

Published online: 28 Dec 2015.

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 212 JPF&T—Journal of Popular Film and Television

“Love Has a History”:

France, Film, and
edith piaf By Peter Baxter
Abstract: Through its portrayal of the singer Edith Piaf, La Môme (France; Dir. Ol-
ivier Dahan, 2007) speaks to French audiences about identity and historical change.
Downloaded by [ECU Libraries] at 01:26 16 March 2016

Although La Môme figures Edith Piaf as exemplary of her society’s transition to

modernity, it also portrays her as a woman stereotypically subject to uncontrollable
emotion. Despite being ruled by her passions, the film’s central character can also
be read in terms of a contemporary perspective affected by changes in women’s
social, economic, and legal status that began to transform and equalize gender rela- Copyright © 2015 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC
DOI: 10.1080/01956051.2015.1043721
tions in France after Piaf’s death.
Color versions of one or more of the figures in the
article can be found online at www.tandfonline.
Keywords:film, France, gender, history, love com/vjpf.

O
livier Dahan’s biopic of Edith Piaf, La Môme, opened in Paris on 14 February 2007. Distrib-
uted in English-language markets as La Vie en Rose, after one of Piaf’s best-known songs, the film’s
original title suggests a quite particular relationship between its subject and French audiences. The
noun “môme,” a “popular word of unknown origin” meaning “child,” “girl,” or “young woman,” is
commonly used in France by members of a family or community in fond reference to a boy or girl who is one of
their own (as in a phrase such as “Une petite môme de cinq ans” [“A little girl five years of age”]) (Le Nouveau Pe-
tit Robert 1621). In 1936, the twenty-year-old street singer Edith Gassion was billed as la môme Piaf for her first
appearance in a Paris cabaret. The stage name was clearly intended to recall the career of Lucienne Suzanne Dho-
telle, a street vendor’s daughter and flower seller who rocketed to popular success in the 1920s as a nightclub singer
known as la môme Moineau. Dhotelle had been nicknamed after the song sparrows (moineaux) of Paris, and sev-

Figure 1. La Môme (2007). Soon after the close of World War I, young Edith Gassion, at the side of her itinerant
street-performer father, sings “La Marseillaise” for an appreciative working-class crowd.

eral years after she left show business to
marry an American billionaire, the word
“piaf ” (a synonym of “moineau”) po-
sitioned Gassion as her successor. The
two singers’ professional names implic-
itly identified them as native Parisians
of the humblest origins, and suggested
that both they and the nightclub patrons
who paid them belonged to a common
family. La Môme, as its title thus im-
plies, is resonant with concepts of gen-
der, family, and nation that are deeply
rooted in French experience (Fig. 1).
Their rearticulation for a twenty-first-
century audience invites a consideration
of popular film’s role in constructing
ideas about identity and the linkage of
past and present.
French critical reception of La Môme
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was not universally positive. A reviewer
for Le Monde dismissed it as “drip-
ping with pathos” (Douin).1 Neverthe-
less, the film immediately became a
box-office success, attracting over five
million spectators on first release in its
home market, and outdrawing every
other French production of the year. By
making this strong popular showing, La
Môme went some way toward allaying
cultural apprehension that the French
film industry was unable to turn out
the kind of “popular, sentimental and
dramatic film” often said to underpin
Hollywood’s domination of the French
market (Douin). Marion Cotillard’s
performance as Edith Piaf was gener-
ally acknowledged to be a professional
triumph. Even critics who deprecated
the film’s melodrama praised her sub-
mergence into a character who ages on
screen from adolescent vitality to the
sad fragility of her final years. Cotillard
was accorded best-actress awards in
France, Britain, and the United States,
and embarked on the high road to inter-
national stardom (meaning, ironically
enough, prominent roles in Hollywood
films).
Edith Piaf achieved global renown
in her lifetime, and her name still re-
tains evocative iconic status in her na-
tive country. Her songs and images,
and narratives about her life, have long
circulated in various formats—record-
ings, films and books, websites, and
exhibitions such as “Piaf, La Môme de
Paris” at the Hotel de Ville de Paris in
France, Film, and Edith Piaf 213
2003/2004 or “Piaf” at the Bibliothèque
Nationale de France in 2015—and may
be regarded as components of a continu-
ing discourse on national experience,
memory, and identity. In this sense, La
Môme, the film, is comparable to one
of those markers of national identity,
continuity, and change that the histo-
rian Pierre Nora has called “lieux de
mémoire” (“places of memory”), the
plaques, cenotaphs, memorials, recon-
structions, and other markers through
which social authorities attempt to
maintain the currency of a preferred past
by creating enduring social simulacra of
intangible, transient, individual memory
(see Nora; Mortaigne). La Môme offers
spectators a narrative about a woman
living through the constant change that
is an inescapable fact of modern expe-
rience, and makes an argument about
the inherent continuity of subjective
identity: the identity of the film’s prin-
cipal character and—because of that
character’s iconic status—of the nation
that she exemplifies. Just in time for
the film’s release, the newsmagazine Le
Point confirmed Edith Piaf’s continuing
symbolic significance for the French
public when it proclaimed on the cover
of an issue of published on 1 February
2007: “The star of song still incarnates
the people’s France.”
La Môme appeared in Parisian cin-
emas as news media were focused on
the political campaigns for an upcom-
ing presidential election. Jacques Chi-
rac, whose back-to-back terms as head
La Môme, the film, is
comparable to one
of those markers of
national identity,
continuity, and
change that the
historian Pierre Nora
has called “lieux de
mémoire” (“places of
memory”) …
of state were coming to a close, was
first elected to the presidency in 1995
on promises to end the economic stag-
nation and social divisions bedevilling
French society. He would be leaving
office in 2007 amid general agreement
that he had failed to come to grips
with these pressing national dilemmas.
Throughout his presidency, painful so-
cial issues such as social exclusion, eth-
nic friction, unemployment, and politi-
cal malfeasance were subjects of intense
public attention, debate, and more than a
few feature films. From La Haine (Dir.
Mathieu Kassovitz, 1995) to L’esquive
(Dir. Abdellatif Kechiche, 2004), from
A la vie, à la mort (Dir. Robert Gué-
diguian, 1995) to L’ivresse du pouvoir
(Dir. Claude Chabrol, 2006), French
cinema again and again portrayed the
flaws and faultlines in France’s social
fabric.2
Desire to map the relations between
films and their historical context is often
a powerful motive for critical inquiry.
Looking back at the cinema of that
period, the editor-in-chief of Cahiers
du Cinéma suggested in 2010 that the
energy of France’s politically oriented
cinema had passed a “turning point,
not perceived at the time, around 2005–
2006,” and given way to an “an almost
phobic refusal of the real” (Delorme 24,
29). Delorme acknowledged that he was
tempted to regard the French cinema’s
abandonment of social reality as a con-
sequence of a transition between what he
calls “two historical moments” (29). The
latter phrase is useful even if (and to an
extent because) Delorme leaves it con-
ceptually vague. Implicitly, he places the
advent of French cinema’s social disen-
gagement against the background of ri-
ots in the banlieues and demonstrations
in the streets of Paris that dramatically
indicated the shortcomings of Chirac’s
social and economic policies. Whether
France’s politically oriented cinema
actually manifested such a disengage-
ment, whether it occured when Delorme
suggests it did, and whether the social
tensions of the time had anything to do
with it, are all questions worth asking. It
is similarly worth asking whether a film
such as La Môme, which on the face of
it has nothing to say about the France
of 2006/2007 (being wholly concerned
 214 JPF&T—Journal of Popular Film and Television
[Delorme] places the
advent of French
cinema’s social
disengagement
against the
background of riots
in the banlieues and
demonstrations in
the streets of Paris
that dramatically
indicated the
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shortcomings of
Chirac’s social and
economic policies.
with the life of a woman born almost a
century before and dead for more than
forty years), offered its own evidence
of a transition between “historical mo-
ments,” and (if so) whether it contrib-
uted to a sense of the past’s meaning for
the present.
An instructive analysis of popular
cinema’s reactive sensitivity to histori-
cal change is offered by Noël Burch
and Genviève Sellier in La Drôle de
Guerre des Sexes du Cinéma Français,
1930–1956, a study of gender relations
in French cinema before, during, and
after World War II. The authors argue
that French films of the 1930s tended to
portray the conflicts of sexual desire be-
tween men and women in stories inter-
weaving “patriarchal power, the capital-
ist system, and national identity” (Burch
and Sellier 27) They assert that, begin-
ning in 1940, the French cinema quickly
and radically shifted storytelling gears
in response to the German invasion and
subsequent armistice. With the division
of the country into occupied and unoc-
cupied zones, and the establishment of
the “French State” under Marshall Pé-
tain, popular cinema reconfigured the
key male and female types that had
characterised pre-war films:
The feature that is without a doubt
most characteristic of the French cin-
ema landscape between 1940 and 1944
is the reversal of the relation between
masculine and feminine characters and
actors. The pre-war cinema privileged
masculine leading roles, while the cin-
ema of the Occupation, on the whole,
is much more likely to place women in
commanding positions. This is a para-
dox if one thinks of the formidable of-
fensive launched by Vichyist ideology
against all manifestations of feminine
independence. (Burch and Sellier 99)
Defeat and occupation so contra-
dicted the cinema’s pre-war affirmation
of patriarchal authority that the concept
could no longer sustain a community of
belief. Almost overnight, as if in com-
pensation for the disempowerment of a
generation of male political and military
authorities, French cinema conjured up
images of female strength (often ide-
alised in terms of restraint and sacri-
fice) and masculine weakness as part of
a new take on gender relations and, by
extension, on national identity.
The history of virtually every na-
tion is punctuated by transformative
events—natural, political, economic,
social—that disrupt social continuity at
several levels. They often have unex-
pected consequences, and can quickly
shift cultural production in unforeseen
directions. Epoch-making events such as
the 1940 Débacle—as the French refer
to their nation’s collapse before the Ger-
man attack—impose themselves alike
on the lives of those who experience
them and on the historians who ponder
their causes and consequences. Apart
from such all-encompassing calamities,
modern life is marked by myriad, ac-
cumulating changes in technology, ma-
terial circumstance, social behaviour,
and ideological orientation. Burch and
Sellier argue that popular culture can
quickly and radically reformulate its sys-
tem of values in the wake of momentous
historical trauma. How do we chart its
responses to incremental changes that,
over time, transform lived experience
pervasively, if almost imperceptibly? In
the absence of such deep historical punc-
tuation as military defeat and occupa-
tion, how does culture recognize, define,
clarify, and explain the transition from
what once was to what is now?
The shifting relation between con-
tinuity and change in society is often a
subject of public attention and debate.
One of Jacques Chirac’s public acts in
the early months of his first term as pres-
ident was a speech in which he offered a
highly symbolic break with the posture
of previous post-war governments re-
garding a shameful episode in France’s
past. On 16 July 1995, on the occasion of
the fifty-third anniversary of the “Rafle
du Vel d’Hiv”—the “dragnet,” in which
Paris police rounded up thousands of
Jews, assembling them in dismal condi-
tions in a velodrome before transporta-
tion to holding camps and their eventual
deaths—Chirac publicly acknowledged
that such crimes against humanity had
been committed by the government of
France during the Second World War.
It was speech meant to encourage the
present to recalculate its view of a past
event, folding it into a sense of national
identity that Chirac judged ready to ac-
commodate it. By contrast, strong af-
firmation that past turning points con-
tinue to be relevant can be deployed to
channel discourse around problematic
change in the present. In 2003/2004,
during debates over the wearing of
“obvious religious symbols” in French
schools, politicians, academics, and
cultural commentators often invoked
France’s 1905 law on the separation of
church and state, which many regarded
as a fundamental element of the modern,
secular Republic. In yet another arena of
social life—the changing nature of the
family in contemporary France—soci-
ologist François de Singly drew a direct
link between the twenty-first century
and the eighteenth, recalling that “The
creation of civil marriage, at the time of
the French Revolution, marks the politi-
cal, philosophical and historical rupture
[emphasis added] between the family
as previously defined as a group and as
centred on the individual” (de Singly
2007). “Rupture” is a contentious con-
cept in historical thought: social change
is rarely universal, and continuity is sel-
dom completely severed. As with not a
few other policies enacted in the years
after 1789, French laws on marriage and
divorce were repeatedly rewritten as
the revolution gave way to directorate,
consulate, empire, restoration, and ensu-

ing regimes, imperial and republican. In
1792, the founders of republican France
defined marriage as a contract between
equals, dissolvable by mutual consent
on the basis of “incompatibility of tem-
per or character” (Ferry 120 n. 33).
Those laws were subjected to almost
two centuries of reformulation before
returning, late in the twentieth century,
to something like the terms envisioned
in the aftermath of revolution. It is not
the least significant aspect of La Môme
that it portrays the childhood of its
central character as deeply marked by
the utter “incompatibility of temper or
character” of her parents, who belonged
(in the film’s twenty-first-century per-
spective) to the France of an almost
unimaginably primitive past. That Piaf
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herself lived wholly in what is now the
past, that aspects of the France that she
inhabited were experienced first hand
by (and continue to be reconstructed in
the memories of) many French citizens
alive when La Môme was released, and
that many aspects of the past lived by
Edith Piaf are now significant in ways
that would not have been anticipated
during her lifetime, all contribute to the
particular connection to the past that
the film constructs for a contemporary
French audience.
Edith Piaf was not yet fifty when she
died in 1963. Piaf’s life, as portrayed in
La Môme, is a condensed narrative of
Piaf’s life, as
portrayed in La
Môme, is a condensed
narrative of
France’s twentieth-
century emergence
from vestigial
traditionalism
to triumphant
modernity, from the
Third Republic to
the Fifth …
France, Film, and Edith Piaf 215
France’s twentieth-century emergence
from vestigial traditionalism to trium-
phant modernity, from the Third Repub-
lic to the Fifth, from a popular culture
rooted in local community and experi-
ence to one inflected by popular images
of America and by the drive for constant
self-reinvention often associated with it.
Nevertheless, however much the world
changes around and for its central char-
acter, La Môme asserts the proposition
that, for the individual, memory and
self-consciousness are the sites of an
essential stability within the constant
change that is the modern condition. La
Môme begins within a framing story that
opens on Piaf’s onstage collapse in New
York in February of 1959. It ends, after
many flashbacks to more distant pasts,
on the night of her death in 1963. For
the most part, the narrative visits mo-
ments along her life’s trajectory from
early childhood to her last days, set out
largely in chronological order. Events in
the nearer past (from 1959 to 1963) trig-
ger events in the farther past (from 1918
through the 1950s) which—while not
always literally “remembered” by the
main character—seem to be of powerful
significance for Piaf as she approaches
her end. The film’s narrative structure is
therefore an index of the main charac-
ter’s subjective identity: it maps mem-
ory’s uses of the past in the constitution
of a present consciousness. The Piaf of
La Môme remains herself even as her
material circumstances change, as ad-
dictions take their toll, as relationships
are forged, maintained, cast aside, or
shattered.
In other words, La Môme is not only
a film about a twentieth-century enter-
tainer who, as journalists for Le Point
commented, “is still with us” in the
twenty-first (Leclère and Lorrain 59),
it is a film about identity’s resilience. It
is an argument for the proposition that
one remains oneself throughout the suc-
cessive, often drastic transformations to
which one’s world is subjected. It is a
film, therefore, pertinent to France in
the era of European integration, of an
ethnic diversity that has become an in-
tractable social problem, of an unstable
global economy soon to become peril-
ously tattered by an as yet unanticipated
great recession, at the precise moment
As important to
La Môme as the
fact that Piaf lives
her present with
the memories of
the past always
in her mind is the
scope of what she
remembers.
of Nicolas Sarkozy’s promise (as presi-
dential candidate when La Môme was
in first-run release) to undertake a “rup-
ture” with the past that would transform
the French economy and the habits and
expectations of the French people.3
As important to La Môme as the fact
that Piaf lives her present with the mem-
ories of the past always in her mind is
the scope of what she remembers. Re-
markably, the Piaf of the film does not
seem to remember anything about the
occupation, despite its terrible conse-
quences (of which Jacques Chirac had
reminded the nation), and despite the
facts that Piaf in life carried on with
her career during wartime and played
an active, high-profile role visiting and
entertaining interned French soldiers.
She does remember, at great length, and
interwoven with the difficulties of pur-
suing her career while suffering from
sickness and addiction, how she met and
lost the man whom the film portrays as
her great love. The place remembered in
this instance is New York City, at mid-
century the capital of world finance and
the centre of global culture. After the
narrative hiatus of the war, Piaf ventures
to the United States for the first time,
pursuing international renown. She
meets another French entertainer earn-
ing his living abroad: Marcel Cernan, a
boxer intent on becoming middleweight
champion of the world. For Edith—as
the film imagines her—Marcel is the
calm center of an American whirlwind,
a lover comfortable in his own skin,
with no interest in riding the back of her
success. A particularly striking scene
 216 JPF&T—Journal of Popular Film and Television
conveys the intersection of Piaf’s pri-
vate emotions and her public identity
as a singer. Having learned that Cernan
has been killed in an airplane crash on a
flight from Paris (undertaken at her urg-
ing), she staggers through the corridors
of her New York apartment, howling in
grief until, in a single shot, she rounds
a corner and steps onto the stage of a
nightclub, as her rendition of “Hymne à
l’Amour” plays on the soundtrack:
Si un jour la vie t’arrache à moi
Si tu meurs que tu sois loin de moi
Peu m’importe si tu m’aimes
Car moi je mourrais aussi
If one day life tears you from me
If you die so you are far from me
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It won’t matter if you love me
Because I would die too
(“Paroles de Hymne à l’amour”)
La Môme represents the life of Edith
Piaf less as something shaped by his-
torical change—despite the narrative’s
coming and going through time—than
as the outward manifestation of a sus-
ceptibility to passionate love that nour-
ishes and intoxicates her, that devours
her and compels her to perform. This
reduction of a woman’s identity to emo-
tional drama is something well known
in cinema history. It is a particular
characteristic of the “woman’s film,” a
Hollywood speciality of the studio era
that was influential well beyond the
boundaries of the United States and of
its own generic form.4 Many scholars
have proposed that the woman’s film
had particular significance with regard
to the status of women in American so-
ciety at mid-century, an “historical mo-
ment” comprising, over the course of
a few decades, deep economic depres-
sion, global war, and a leap into con-
sumerist prosperity. The woman’s film
flourished in its American context, but
it is important to understand that this
Hollywood genre was a local variant
of a vast historical project of which La
Môme too was an instrument, operating
at a later time, made in a different place,
but working to a comparable end.
“Love has a history,” writes Florence
Montreynaud in an exceptionally per-
ceptive forward to Aimer: Un Siècle de
Liens Amoureux, a compendium of the
love stories that fascinated twentieth-
century consumers of popular culture
Whatever the lineage
(Montreynaud vii). The origins of the of the Western love
love story, its characteristics and cultural
significance, have long been subjects of story, it is generally
historical research and speculation. Jean agreed that some
H. Hagstrum, tracing its lineage as far
back as The Iliad, calls Homer “one of three hundred years
the greatest love poets of the Western
tradition,” though he adds as an impor- ago, this literary
tant qualification, “if love is not defined
as romantic rapture” (Hagstrum 54).
form began to inflect
The earliest European expression of this some important
latter emotion lies, he suggests, in the
lyric poetry of Sappho. Theodore Zeldin practicalities of
argues that the crucial literary model
for portraying the kind of “romantic
European life.
rapture” that preoccupies the modern
Western imagination lies less with Sap-
pho than with seventh-century Arabian explore the interactions between men
poetry and song addressed largely to a and women has privileged physical and
female public: “Whereas the old songs moral attraction between individuals
as the essential foundation of mutually
were about war,” he says, “these sing-
sustaining relationships. A culture of
ers sang only about love, the women
“romantic love” supplies a wardrobe of
demanding lyrics in which they could
signs to clothe sexual behaviour in moral
recognise their own feelings” (Zeldin
legitimacy. For much of its history, pop-
78). From there, if we are to credit De-
ular cinema has made portraying the
nis de Rougemont’s Love in the Western
origins and consequences of elective
World, the imagery of intense romantic
affinities—i.e., telling love stories—a
attraction traversed Muslim Spain and
fundamental part of its repertoire.
began to infiltrate post-classical Euro-
In this respect, Edith Piaf as por-
pean literature through the agency of
trayed in La Môme belongs both to the
twelfth-century troubadors. Eventually,
modernity that puts individual desire
Alain Vaillant asserts, love stories came
at the center of narrative (and social)
to permeate “almost all literature, and
agency, and to what might be seen as
all its history” (Vaillant 8). Whatever
one of the reaction formations against
the lineage of the Western love story, it
modernity’s privileging of individual-
is generally agreed that some three hun-
ity and equality. This reaction appears
dred years ago, this literary form began
in the woman’s film’s constantly reit-
to inflect some important practicalities
erated proposition that women, despite
of European life. Marriage, which had
their subjective self-possession, are
long been an institution founded pri-
particularly susceptible to love’s allure,
marily on socioeconomic utility, began
and particularly apt to be unhinged by
to be identified with the fulfillment of
their desire for love. The life that Edith
individual emotion. In Montreynaud’s
Piaf “remembers” in La Môme is one
account:
in which she is neglected by a drunken
Towards the middle of the eighteenth mother, abandoned by her father to the
century in Europe, it began to be ad- care of prostitutes who shower her with
mitted that mutual affection could be
the basis of marriage. Artists portrayed affection (that otherwise has no outlet),
the ideal of romantic love; couples and from whom she is torn away by that
formed as a consequence of a personal same father in order to help him make
decision, according to “elective affini- his own living as a carnival and street
ties”—the title of a novel by Goethe. performer. Every emotional relationship
(xii)
into which Edith Piaf enters is painfully
In ensuing centuries, the cultural dissolved, shaken apart, betrayed. Only
imagination in which Western societies her audiences in their multitudinous an-

onymity offer her their unfailing devo-
tion, and the stage to which she returns
again and again is the only place where
she achieves—at a fatal cost—some-
thing like brief, coherent identity.
What offsets this “woman’s film” bias
of La Môme, what ensures that its por-
trayal of female fragility is not simply
dismissed by contemporary audiences in
France and elsewhere is that while Piaf
is a woman, therefore self-destructively
susceptible to the power of love, she is
a woman who achieves social recogni-
tion and economic independence on the
basis of unique ability, uncommon am-
bition, and extraordinary effort. Piaf as
portrayed here can be considered indica-
tive of a historically transitional model
of approved feminine identity, with its
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own particular significance for audience
members raised in the historical context
of the Fifth Republic. While bearing in
mind the fact that Piaf died in 1963, con-
sider Montreynaud’s summary outline
of women’s changing circumstances in
the late twentieth century:
The critical turning point [in the
achievement by women of their own
identity], in almost all of the West,
takes place between 1965 and 1975. It
is not a matter of a rupture [emphasis
added] that those contemporary with
it could have perceived, but of the in-
ception of a social metamorphosis. It
is expressed firstly by a shake-up of
statistical curves: births and marriages
diminish, divorces increase, pre-mari-
tal sexual relations become common-
place, the age of marriage rises as does
that of the first child. There follows,
with a larger or smaller lag according
to the country, changes in laws on con-
traception, divorce, abortion, marriage,
the sharing of parental responsibilities,
the transmission of the woman’s fam-
ily name, etc., which bring law and
practices into conformity. This vast
movement, still incomplete today, ac-
companies a restructuring and re-eval-
uation of the relations between men
and women, while the couple, itself
undergoing mutation, is resituated in a
society that is more and more complex
and mobile. (xv)
The emancipation of women from
male tutelage is the culmination of a
concept of society based upon the lib-
erty of the individual, including the
rights to marry and to divorce by choice.
In France this concept is universally as-
France, Film, and Edith Piaf 217
sociated with the revolution of 1789, but
its eventual actualisation in terms of the
rights of French women can be followed
through the bills broadening women’s
legal rights enacted by one government
after another since the early years of the
Fifth Republic:
1965: Married women enabled to
work without husband’s consent
1967: Contraception becomes legally
accessible
1970: Notion of “chef de famille”
suppressed from Civil Code
1975: Abortion legalized up to tenth
week of pregnancy
1975: Divorce by mutual consent
becomes possible
1986: Married women may
administer their own property
1990: Court of Appeals condemns
rape in marriage
1992: Law sanctioning sexual
harassment by workplace
superiors
1999: Law prescribing gender parity
in electoral slates
1999: Law establishing Pacte civile
de solidarité et de concubinage
(PACS)
2000: Law allowing women to work
at night
2001: Period for legal abortion
extended to 12 weeks
2001: Abortions permitted
for minors without parental
permission
2003: Surname may be transmitted
to child by mother or father or by
both
2005: Rights of PACS couples
harmonised with those of married
couples
2006: Strengthened law against
conjugal violence5
By the middle of the 1990s, it was
becoming self-evident that the terms
within which French men and women
shared their lives together were under-
going profound transformation. Some
of this transformation’s consequences
for French conjugality were already
clear, and contentious. A multi-part in-
quiry by Le Monde, published in 1994,
By the middle of
the 1990s, it was
becoming self-
evident that the
terms within which
French men and
women shared their
lives together were
undergoing profound
transformation.
investigated the state of the French fam-
ily and declared that the kind of family
that had been considered the “basic cell”
of society was in a piteous state: “The
‘nuclear’ family—father, mother and
children sharing the same residence—
accounts for no more than a third of
the famous “households” surveyed”
(Tincq). Changes in family composition
over the 1990s were real and quantifi-
able. In 1990, according to the Institut
National de la Statistique et des Etudes
Economiques, one out of ten young
people (younger than 25) lived with a
single parent, 86 percent of whom were
women (Vaysse). By 1999, more than
one out of five, a total of some three
million children, “were not living with
their parents” (Chemin). In the last de-
cade of the twentieth century and the
first decade of the twenty-first, a steady
stream of books discussing the conse-
quences for society and its children of
the increasing prevalence of the “famille
recomposée” (blended family) flowed
from French publishers.
In general, several phenomena were
becoming clear: year by year a constantly
declining portion of the population en-
tered marriage; those who married did
so later in life, and they were increas-
ingly apt to terminate those relationships
through either divorce or simple separa-
tion. Nothing so clearly demonstrates
the declining French taste for traditional
marriage than statistics since the proc-
lamation of PACS in 1999. The PACS,
as it is known, was a measure taken by
 218 JPF&T—Journal of Popular Film and Television
Figure 2. La Môme (2007). On a California beach, at the height of her international fame,
Edith Piaf knits while an American journalist interviews her about life and love.
Downloaded by [ECU Libraries] at 01:26 16 March 2016
Lionel Jospin’s socialist-led govern-
ment to establish a legal framework
for couples to formalize their relation-
ship by means other than marriage. This
measure was largely driven by political
pressure to permit relations between gay
partners to be recognized in law, while
avoiding the controversy that would be
entailed by simply legalizing same-sex
marriage (something not achieved until
2013). From 2001 to 2007, marriages
between men and women declined from
298,000 to 260,000, while the number
of heterosexual couples entering into
a pacte civil went up by a startling de-
gree, from 15,426 to about 97,000 (and
the number of pactes between persons
of the same sex increased from 4,206 to
5,012) (Pison).
La Môme offers a fictional narrative
of the life of a woman who lived the
changes of French society between 1915
and 1963, and who, despite the enor-
mous developments that had taken place
between her death and 2007, continued
to figure in the shared imagery through
which a concept of French identity could
be formulated. For this iconic figure of a
woman, love is as important to a sense
of self as the singing by which she earns
her living. Marriage, on the other hand,
is so marginally significant that, despite
the fact that Piaf was married twice, the
successive husbands barely register in
the film. Her first husband, Jacques Pills,
is glimpsed as an unnamed companion
during an American sojourn, and her
second, Théophanis Lamboukas, figures
as no more than a name she utters in
distress at one of her final concerts. Of
far more importance are the profound
emotional ties—and their retention in
Piaf’s memory—which provided bear-
ings during the tumultuous modernity
through which she forged her career:
her childhood relation to the father who
both loved and exploited her, her love
for the prostitute who offered the clos-
est thing to maternal affection that she
had ever known, her passion for a lover
(Cernan, married and therefore unattain-
able) for whose death the film’s Edith
felt responsible. What La Môme puts on
the screen, one needs to remember, is
an imagined version of how those ties
were lived, a version generated by and
for a twenty-first-century society still
What La Môme puts connected by experience and memory to
on the screen … is the world Piaf inhabited, but profoundly
altered by the historical transformations
an imagined version that took place during and after the pe-
riod reconstituted by the film.
of how those ties There is a scene late in La Môme that
were lived, a version seems clearly intended to offer a state-
ment of the protagonist’s hard-earned
generated by and wisdom (Fig. 2). Cotillard’s Piaf, at the
pinnacle of international stardom, sits
for a twenty-first- on the beach at Malibu, knitting. In big
century society close up, she answers the questions of
a chic young American journalist work-
still connected ing for a woman’s magazine. At first the
questions concern her favorite colour
by experience and favorite food. Then, while the im-
and memory to ages on the screen shift to Piaf and her
audience in the moments before her last
the world Piaf concert at the Olympia in Paris, she is
asked, off, about the counsel she would
inhabited, but offer the readers:
profoundly altered Journalist: If you had advice to give
to a young woman, what would it be?
by the historical Piaf: To love.
transformations Journalist: To a girl?
Piaf: To love.
that took place Journalist: To a child?
Piaf: To love.
during and
The players in the scene are tricked
after the period out in hairstyles and costumes that sug-
reconstituted by gest the mid-twentieth-century setting.
It is nevertheless appropriate to regard
the film. this dialogue between two women as

belonging also to a much larger-scale
“historical moment,” which began for
Western societies some centuries ago, in
the transition to modernity. In this frame
of reference, the Edith Piaf imagined
by La Môme in 2007 may be consid-
ered a contemporary of the Princesse de
Clèves, whose unconsummated love for
the Duc de Nemours was the subject of
the eponymous 1678 novel by the Mar-
quise de Lafayette. Long a set-test for
students in French lycées, La Princesse
de Cleves was dismissed—in a much-
reported offhand remark—by Nicolas
Sarkozy for its irrelevance to students in
today’s France. Nevertheless, the sev-
enteenth-century novel and the twenty-
first-century film propose hardly the
slightest difference in what motivates
Downloaded by [ECU Libraries] at 01:26 16 March 2016
a woman’s actions amid the complex,
money-driven, power-ridden conflicts
of the society she inhabits. At the same
time, so to speak, over the course of the
Fifth Republic the status of women in
French society had undergone a far-
reaching “social metamorphosis” in law,
practice, and social attitudes. This meta-
morphosis created some peculiar filters
through which Piaf’s life—which began
in the Third Republic and ended before
the reforms of the Fifth began to be
enacted—could be rendered meaning-
ful for French audiences of 2007. Most
particularly, anxiety about the present
state and future prospects of the family
in French society, and legislation reduc-
ing marriage itself from one of social
necessity to one of the available options
for men and women intent on legally
formalizing their relationships, made
the twelve years of Jacques Chirac’s
presidency an “historical moment” in
which longstanding social norms went
through extensive, widely discussed
recalibration.
La Môme reaffirms modernity’s con-
fidence that individual identity persists
despite the turbulence of profound his-
torical change. By expressing that out-
look in a character who continues to
be closely associated with the idea of
modern France, it asserts confidence in
the continuation of a particular national
identity through historical changes that
render the nation today as apparently dif-
France, Film, and Edith Piaf 219
ferent from what it was in the past as the
wasted figure of Edith Piaf at her final
concert was from the little girl singing
the “Marseillaise” to a curbside crowd
for a few coins. Nevertheless, insofar
as La Môme typecasts Piaf’s identity
in terms of the emotional need through
which popular culture channels its esti-
mation of female identity, it is clear that
at least one “vast movement” of social
change is (to quote Montreynaud for the
last time) “still incomplete today.”
NOTES
1. Unless otherwise indicated, all transla-
tions from French are mine.
2. On what Martin O’Shaughnessy has
called this “return of the social” in French
cinema, see O’Shaughnessy; Hayes and
O’Shaughnessy.
3. On Sarkozy’s promises, see Tevanian.
4. This doesn’t mean that it is any less the
“biopic” mentioned at the beginning of this
essay. Le Monde defined the genre for its
readers in an article anticipating the film’s
release; see Lesprit, Regnier, and Siclier. For
a study of La Môme as biopic, see Moine.
5. For a discussion of many of these
changes, see Blöss and Frickey.
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Peter Baxter teaches in the Department of
Film & Media, Queen’s University, Kings-
ton, Ontario, Canada. Some of his recent
work on French cinema has appeared in
Studies in French Cinema, Quarterly Re-
view of Film and Video, Canadian Journal
of Film Studies, and Screen.