As a fan of French music, I hadn’t heard of Jean Ferrat (1930-2010) until recently. But I felt a real lift when I listened to his heroic songs. Yes, he had courage. In his songs he names political figures directly, and you can sense his views coming through, restrained but clear. His warm voice takes me back to those days, days of innocence. I believe the French, originally, were a modest people. The nightingale’s voice and its intent bring back the spirit of that era.

Back then, there was no excess, not too many cars, and progress was still in its infancy. Ferrat, in my view, didn’t sing to pass the time. He wrote songs and performed them to give something to society, to express himself, to find joy and to bring joy to us, his listeners. I get the sense that fame itself didn’t really tempt him. What mattered to him was expressing his values (communism, feminism, helping others, humility, brotherhood), and his songs were built on them.

The Establishment’s Rival

Jean Ferrat, singer and songwriter, was born in 1930 near Paris to a Jewish father who had emigrated from Russia in 1905, and a French mother. He was the youngest of four siblings. As a child, his parents instilled in him a love of music and song. He grew up listening to the songs of Charles Trenet (1913-2001). As a teenager, he devoured the poets Nâzım Hikmet (1902-1963), Federico García Lorca (1898-1936), Louis Aragon (1897-1982), Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867), and others.

For about a decade he strummed his guitar before anyone started to listen. With the poet Aragon’s blessing, in 1956 he composed and performed the song “The Eyes of Elsa” (Les yeux d’Elsa).

I’ve been singing for twenty years, and this is the first time I’ve been able to sing on television for a full hour about whatever I want.

In France during Charles de Gaulle’s (1890-1970) years in power, television and radio were tightly controlled. Songs judged politically or morally wrong were banned from broadcast. Jean Ferrat found himself among the banned artists, alongside Léo Ferré (1916-1993), Georges Brassens (1921-1981), Jacques Brel (1929-1978), and others.

His personal background and his political commitment shaped his combative streak. When Jean Ferrat was 10, his father was deported to Auschwitz. Ferrat watched it happen: his father was taken by the Gestapo while they were walking down the street together. In that moment, his world collapsed. Scarred by that event, he wrote the song “No One Recovers From Their Childhood” (Nul ne guérit de son enfance). It’s likely a song of consolation.

Jean Ferrat found shelter with communist fighters. That dark period inspired him, in 1963, to write the song “Night and Fog” (Nuit et brouillard). The broadcasting authority refused to air it, because it mentioned the victims of the Nazi camps at a time when France and Germany were reconciling.

My father was arrested during the war. He was Jewish, and he wore the yellow star. He said goodbye to us, and from there he was held in the Pithiviers and Drancy internment camps. From there, he was sent onward, to a destination that wasn’t yet known. None of us ever heard from him again, but we hoped he would come back. Of course, he never did. He was deported to Auschwitz, and a few days later, he died. In 1945, after the war, we finally received confirmation of it from the government.

When the war ended, he gave up his studies and went to work to support his family, with no diploma and no experience. At the same time, he took acting lessons and tried his hand at music too. At 24, he decided to become a singer and performed in various cabarets around Paris. He sang love songs, poems set to music, protest songs. He was afraid of being pigeonholed as a ballad singer. It took him a decade to become known. As a political singer, Jean Ferrat stayed loyal to communist ideals without ever joining the French Communist Party.

Are you a communist?
I’m sympathetic to and supportive of communists, but I’m not a fighter for the cause.
Why don’t you go all the way?
Does the idea of carrying a membership card scare you?
I think the struggle can be carried on through singing, just as it can at the local level, where I already have a role to play.

He kept an air of mystery about himself. He never defined himself as a communist or anything else. In doing so, he let others figure out who he was.

Following the song “Potemkine” (Potemkine), which he released in 1965, about the 1905 mutiny aboard the Russian battleship, Jean Ferrat was accused of justifying Sovietism.

The Fight Continues

At 37, Jean Ferrat visited Cuba. He performed there a few times and grew a mustache. In May 1968, he supported the workers’ cause. That turbulent spring of uprising inspired him to write the song “My France” (Ma France). Because the song didn’t exactly flatter the government, it was banned from broadcast. Jean Ferrat refused to appear on television unless he could sing it.

It took two years before he returned to the stage. In the song, you can sense his conflicted feelings toward his homeland: on one hand, the beautiful landscapes of France, and on the other, the rigid policies of its leaders. France, indeed, serves as an example for other nations, but it has at times failed its own people, whether child laborers in the mines, factory workers, or even Victor Hugo (1802-1885), who was sent into exile.

Do you believe in power?
I don’t believe in power. We live in a world that uses power and violence. We’re in the thick of violence. We put up with it, true, but sometimes, to justify it, it gets dressed up in “sweet talk.”

These remarks didn’t sit well with the broadcasting authority’s management. As a result, his appearances on certain programs were canceled. From then on, he was kept off television for about three years. In the 1970s, he moved to the Ardèche (a region in southeastern France), where he had a house. Living far from the capital’s bustle didn’t stop him from criticizing others in the entertainment world. In 1975, an editorial by Jean d’Ormesson (1925-2017), about the Vietnam War and the victory of the Vietnamese communists, sent Jean Ferrat into a rage.

In response, he wrote the song “Un Air de Liberté,” a kind of furious manifesto aimed against colonial France, and presenting Ferrat as a peace-seeker striving for freedom. D’Ormesson considered the song defamatory and filed a complaint. The song was pulled from the 1976 program “Jean Ferrat.”

You won’t see all the songs, one is missing. Mr. d’Ormesson, director of the newspaper Le Figaro, found this song defamatory, so the management decided to pull it.

That song, too, was banned from broadcast. As a mocking reply to the ban, Jean Ferrat wrote the song “Quand On N’interdira Plus Mes Chansons” (When My Songs Will No Longer Be Banned).

Ferrat was a modest man. When he was presented with a platinum record, he returned it. He naively believed that the long line forming to buy tickets to his show was actually there for a boxing match in the hall next door.

He kept up with current events. For example, when Jean-Marie Le Pen’s (1928-2025) party, the Front National, gained votes, it angered him. He wasn’t cut off from the world just because he’d left Paris. His move to the Ardèche shows just how much he needed peace and quiet. He never put much stock in money or show business. Still, he didn’t fully retreat: he kept writing at a table in the café at the center of the village.

Songs Full of Feeling

His songs reveal real sensitivity. After a friend of his died, he wrote the song “You Could Have Lived” (Tu aurais pu vivre) in his honor.

He also composed the optimistic song “Life Is Beautiful” (C’est beau la vie) for Isabelle Aubret (born 1938) after she was in a car accident.

He set the poems of Louis Aragon to music. The best known of these is “What Would I Be Without You?” (Que serais-je sans toi?).

In his own way, he was something of a feminist. Even though women were often portrayed as weak, he valued their work and their contribution to society, through songs like “My Girl” (Ma môme).

and “Woman Is the Future of Man” (La femme est l’avenir de l’homme).

Jean Ferrat, the man, died in 2010 at the age of 79 from lung cancer. But his memory lives on through his songs and through the festival held in his name every year since 2011, bringing us his beautiful songs sung in a warm voice with a perfect Parisian accent.