She was the one French singer on Rolling Stone’s 2023 record of the 200 finest singers of all time.
Ms. Hardy’s ethereal, virtually frail voice expressed a specific type of French youthful ennui whereas changing into fuller with the years. She sang of affection sought and never discovered, of affection misplaced, of time passing, of hopes unfilled, to phrases written by herself, by the French pop legend Serge Gainsbourg and even by the Nobel Prize-winning novelist Patrick Modiano (who wrote, within the track “Etonnez-moi, Benoit,” “Astonish-me, Benedict, stroll in your palms, swallow some pine cones, Benedict”).
Ms. Hardy captured the melancholy of her technology, born, like her, on the finish of World Conflict II and, like her, unhappy by France’s materials progress within the many years after, within the “Trente Glorieuses,” or “30 Superb Years.”
That youthful discontent, anticipated by the Existentialists — she was generally thought-about their pop-singer adept — exploded within the demonstrations in France of Could 1968, when her fame was at its peak, although she disapproved of them and fled to her retreat in Corsica. The phrases Mr. Gainsbourg wrote for her that 12 months in incarnated the icon of cool she had already turn into: “Underneath no pretext/Would I wish to have/The reflexes of unhappiness.”
Certainly, her cult of steely, solitary disappointment would maintain her effectively shy of actions of mass solidarity, rejecting what she known as “the intolerances of the left” and steering her later towards right-leaning affinities with the likes of Nicolas Sarkozy, the previous French president, or the misanthropic author Michel Houellebecq.
A broken childhood with a single mom led Ms. Hardy to hunt refuge in inside exploration, via songwriting. As she informed Le Monde in 2016: “I’m incapable of dissimulating and mendacity. Writing a track, quite the opposite, forces you to go deep into what you have got lived, and felt.” Songwriting, she mentioned, was “an outlet.”
