Category: Culture

The French Connection radio: Spéciale Bastille 2026

Mike-on-Bike

Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité

By Mike Stevenson

This Tuesday July 14, we celebrate Bastille Day, commemorating the 1789 storming of the Bastille prison, a pivotal event that dismantled the absolute monarchy and launched the French Revolution.

For modern democracies (c’est nous?) the day symbolizes the triumph of popular sovereignty over tyranny, the power of collective civic action, and the universal principles of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity.

Marchons, marchons!
– Les enfants de la Maîtrise de Paris “La Marseillaise”
– Biréli Lagrène “Viper’s Dream” (Fletcher Allen) Gipsy Project, 2001
– Francis Cabrel “The Mighty Quinn” (Bob Dylan) Vise le Ciel 2012
– Yves Montand “À Bicyclette”(Francis Lai,Pierre Barouh) 1968
– Pomplamoose “Je Me Suis Fait Tout Petit” (Brassens) En Francaise 2019
– Georges Brassens “J’ai Connu des Vous” (Trenet) Chant Les Chansons De Sa Jeunesse 1982
– Charles Trenet “Douce France/Sweet France,” 1947

Le générique Set 1:
– Les Negresse Vertes “La Valse” Mlah 1988

L’ame de Poetes
– Alain Goraguer “Blues de Memphis”
– Serge Gainsbourg “Requiem Pour une Twisteur” Salut Les Compains
– Barbara “Ne me Quitte Pas” (Jacques Brel) Chante Brassens et Brel 1963
– Noel Harrison “L’ame de Poetes / Soul of the Poet” (Trenet) Live at McCabe’s, 2013
– Pauline Croze “Samba Saravah” Bossa Nova, 2016
– Marie Laforêt “Katy Cruelle” (traditional) Album 2, 1966
– François Hardy “Pas Gentille” (Marty Wilde) Mon Amie la Rose, 1964
– Juliette Magnevasoa  “Le Gens Qui Doutent” (Anne Sylvestre) Les Routines, 2025
– Elizabeth Shepherd “Les Amoureux Banc Publiques”/ Lovers on the Park Bench (Brassens) Rewind, 2012

marie Laforet

By the end of the 1960s Marie Laforêt had become a rather distinctive figure in the French pop scene. Her songs offered a more mature, poetic, tender alternative to the light, teenage yé-yé tunes charting in France at the time.

Le générique Set 2:
– Toots Thielemans “Blacksmith Blues” Toots, 1961

FIN
– Humphrey Bogart, Paul Henreid “La Marseillaise” dialogue from 1943 film Casablanca
– Camille “Festin” from the Pixar animated film Ratatouille, 2007
– Django Reinhardt and the Quintet of the Hot Club of France “La Marseillaise” 1946
– Eileen “Les Buttes Sont Faites Pour Marche” / These Boots Are Made for Walkin’ (Lee Hazlewood)

PROGRAM NOTES & Links

-“La Marseillaise” is the national anthem of France. It was written in 1792 by Claude Joseph Rouget de Lisle in Strasbourg after the French Kingdom declared war against Austria, and was originally titled “Chant de Guerre pour l’Armée du Rhin” (“War Song for the Army of the Rhine”)

– In the tradition of Django Reinhardt, Biréli Lagrène is one of most highly regarded Gypsy jazz, bebop, and fusion guitarists of recent decades. He was once invited onstage to jam with Stéphan Grappelli when he was only ten years old.

Pomplamoose

– The lead singer for the indie-pop duo Pomplamoose, Nataly Dawn, co-founded the band in 2008 alongside her husband, multi-instrumentalist Jack Conte. The latest album from  the duo is Photogénique, a “lush and groovy French bossa-pop album” released in Summer 2025. Pomplamoose plays in concert August 18 at Paradise Rock Club in Boston, MA

– Following the death of Noel Harrison in 2013, his wife Lori released the excellent album Live at McCabes.  The English singer/actor was best known for singing  “The Windmills of Your Mind” in the 1968 film The Thomas Crown Affair. That song (composed by French musician Michel Legrand, with English lyrics by Alan and Marilyn Bergman) won the Academy Award for Best Original Song

– Actress/singer Marie Laforêt ( 5 October 1939 – 2 November 2019) originally released the Appalachian folk song “Katy Cruelle” in 1965. The most famous recording of the song is widely considered to be Karen Dalton’s haunting 1971 rendition on her album In My Own Time.

Magnevasoa


– The Franco-Malagasy artist Juliette Magnevasoa is redefining the French Chanson genre, blending intimate folk with traditional chanson. Her version of Anne Sylvestre’s “Les gens qui doutent” has 1.8 million internet views to date.

Two EPs are planned for summer 2026 and her debut full-length album is due to be released in 2027. Juliette Magnevasoa appears at the historic Les Trois Baudets in Paris on October 28

–Serge Gainsbourg’s 1962 track “Requiem pour un twisteur” (Requiem for a Twist Dancer) is a darkly humorous, noir-tinged song about a charismatic playboy who dances himself to death. It is a satirical look at the early ’60s cultural craze for “the Twist”

Casablanca


– The two main female actresses who sing “La Marseillaise” in Rick’s Café in the film Casablanca are French actress Madeleine Lebeau (Rick’s jilted lover, Yvonne who famously cries out “Vive la France!” at the end of the song) and American cabaret singer and actress Corinna Mura (who played the guitar-strumming café entertainer.)

– Elizabeth Shepherd is a Montreal-based jazz pianist and singer. She has earned six JUNO Award nominations—Canada’s equivalent of the Grammys. She is performing Friday, August 14 in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island.

– Yé-yé singer “Eileen,” who recorded the French adaptation of Nancy Sinatra’s “These Boots Are Made for Walkin’”, was actually born in New York City. Eileen Goldsen, left New York as a teenager to study French at UCLA and graduated expecting to become a French teacher. At just 22 years old, she moved to Paris and found work translating American folk songs into French. Eileen soon recorded “Les Buttes Sont Faites Pour Marche” a yé-yé hit in 1966.

Special thanks to production assistant Agneau de Présalé
“À bientôt”

25 years of ‘Amélie’: the movie that changed my life

25 years on, Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s movie ‘Amélie’ is still just as fresh and enjoyable as it was in 2001, led by a brilliant performance from Audrey Tautou.

Source: 25 years of ‘Amélie’: the movie that changed my life

This April, Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Amélie turns 25, and in a few months’ time, so do I, becoming the same age as one of my most beloved films, and just a year or two older than the protagonist, who was played so charmingly by Audrey Tautou.

I’ve long felt a deep connection to the film, although that’s hardly a unique experience, as millions of people love Amélie, and it’s perhaps one of the most famous French movies ever made, rivalling French New Wave classics like Breathless when the question ‘name a French film’ is asked. You don’t have to be into foreign or arthouse cinema to have seen the 2001 film, and for many, it’s a gateway; it certainly was for me.

But while we often discard these gateway films in favour of weirder, more obscure ones as we delve into a specific niche, I could never forget how perfect Amélie is, and while some might see it as a little saccharine, I would simply argue against that conception. Sure, it has its moments, but the film is aware of these, and it asks us to lean into the whimsy, to appreciate the more wholesome parts of life.

You can take it from me, as I’m not one to enjoy a saccharine movie and much rather watch something a bit depressing, to be honest, but Amélie Poulain just steals my heart every time, and makes me wish I worked in a Parisian café, distracting myself from my own world by getting stuck into the lives of others, while buoyed by perhaps the most French-sounding score of all-time courtesy of Yann Tiersen.

Amélie is illuminated in a warm and nostalgic palette of reds, greens and yellows, making me yearn for my world to actually look as vibrant and fantastical as that, even when everything is a little too green, and I love that there are little moments of magic that colour the everyday, like when the titular character lies in bed, and the lamp by her side momentarily comes to life, the ceramic pig attached to the stand pulling the cord and turning out the light.

I love her desire to help others and to see the best in people, although she never gets too good for a bit of playful revenge, like when she sabotages Collignon’s routine because of his treatment of the mentally-disabled Lucien, and I definitely enjoy her strange friendship with the glass man, Raymond, who carefully paints reproductions of Luncheon of the Boating Party and soon unlocks the key to Amélie’s desire for romance with a young man named Nino.

What I love most, though, is how romance plays a central role in the film without being its sole defining factor, as regardless of the fact that Amélie is pretty lonely, when she realises that she fancies Nino, she enacts a cat-and-mouse game with him, all the while playing matchmaker for others and meddling in their lives for the sake of helping people for the better.

Her interest in Nino is playful and ultimately rewarding because she finds her match in a man who is similarly a little odd, his quirk being collecting disused photobooth strips and compiling them into a photo album, while Amélie has a whole host of peculiarities which the film so adoringly celebrates, like hearing the cracking of a crème brûlée, with the montage of her favourite little moments, and those of her friends and family, never failing to elicit a smile.

The film highlights those intense moments of fancying someone, with Amélie’s heart literally thumping out of her chest at one point when she sees Nino, and while she gets her happy ending with him, the film doesn’t ever make this romance its only conceit, which remains focused on the tale of a dreaming introvert who finds her own ways of communicating and connecting with others, of imagining the world around her, like when she observes others in the cinema with a smile or contemplates how many people are having sex across Paris in that very moment, and never before had I seen a film with a character quite like her.

Watching Amélie as a teenager for the first time was a turning point, giving me someone I could relate to, who was quiet but never subservient, who found happiness in her own determined and fun way. And what’s more, it opened me up to a world of cinema I didn’t quite know existed; I’d certainly seen a few foreign films before, but this one was so vibrant, so artistically-driven without sacrificing plot or character development, that it was witty and stylish, and an utterly addictive gateway.

I fell in love with the movie and subsequently immersed myself in the kinds of cinema that further depicted a world so real yet larger-than-life, with Amélie becoming the cinematic embodiment of possibility and pure magic to me, and years later, that magic is still there, flickering through every frame.

The French Connection celebrates “Barbara”

By Michael Stevenson

Our featured performer tonight on WRIU.org’s THE FRENCH CONNECTION is “Barbara” — one of the most important voices in French chanson.
Born Monique Andrée Serf, she performed under a single name – perhaps one name was all she needed.

Barbara

Barbara sang quietly, often from behind a piano, trusting words, silences, and emotion more than volume. Elle chante vrai.

Many of Barbara’s songs are tied directly to her life — sometimes painfully so.
She was Jewish, spent years in hiding during World War II, and was abused and later abandoned by her father. Those experiences don’t always appear explicitly in her lyrics, but they echo in her songs. La mémoire est partout — memory is everywhere.

  • PLAYLIST
    “La Femme d’Hector” (Brassens) 1956
    “Il Nous Faut Regarder” (Brel) 1956
    “Les Amis de Monsieur”, 1956
    “Dis, Quand Reviendras-tu”, 1964
    “Ma plus belle histoire d’amour”, 1967
    “Nantes”, 1964
    “La Solitude”, 1965
    “Göttingen”, 1965
    “Une Petite Cantate”, 1965
    “Mon Enface”, 1968
    – Martha Wainwright “Quand Reviendras-tu” (Barbara)
    – Francis Cabrel “Quand j’ame un fois j’aime pour toujours” (Desjardins)

Listen to The French Connection ::  December 28, 2025

Bardot

DECEMBER 28, 2025 SALUT!

  • Boris Vian “J’Suis Snob”

REST IN PEACE, B.B.
“I gave my beauty and my youth to men, and now I am giving my wisdom and experience … the best of me, to animals.”

  • Brigitte Bardot “La Madrague” (1963)
  • Brigitte Bardot & Serge Gainsbourg “Bonnie & Clyde” (Serge Gainsbourg) (1967)

POST-WAR CHANSON
Smoky cafés, cobblestone streets, and a deep longing for a pre-war idealized Paris

  • Léo Ferré “Noël” (1961)
  • Catherine Sauvage “Avec Le Temps”
  • Léo Ferré “Le Vampire” (Baudelaire)
  • Barbara “Göttingen” (Monique Andrée Serf)
  • Barbara “Les Voyages” (Monique Andrée Serf)
  • Barbara “Ne Me quitte Pas (Jacques Brel)
  • Jacques Brel “Quand on n’a que l’amour” (Brel)
  • George Brassens “La Prière” (Francis Jammes / Brassens)
  • George Brassens “Le Piere Noël et le Petit Fille” (Brassens)
  • Catherine Sauvage “Black Trombone” (Serge Gainsbourg)
  • Léo Ferré “Saint Germaine des Pres” (Ferré)

Source: The French Connection :: Playlist and replay – WRIU 90.3 FM