She was the only French singer to appear on Rolling Stone magazine’s 2023 list of the 200 Greatest Singers of All Time.
Ms. Hardy’s ethereal, almost frail voice expressed a particular type of boredom of French youth, while thickening with the years. She sang of love sought and not found, love lost, time passing, hopes dashed, to words written by herself, by French pop legend Serge Gainsbourg and even by award-winning novelist Nobel Patrick Modiano (who wrote, in the song “Amaze me, Benoit”, “Astonish me, Benoît, walk on your hands, swallow pine cones, Benoît”).
Ms. Hardy captured the melancholy of her generation, born like her at the end of the Second World War and, like her, dissatisfied with France’s material progress in the decades that followed, in the “Trente Glorieuses” or “30 Glorieuses “. »
This youthful discontent, anticipated by the existentialists, was sometimes considered their pop singer following — exploded during the protests in France in May 1968, when her fame was at its peak, even though she disapproved of them and fled to her retirement in Corsica. The words that Mr. Gainsbourg wrote to her that year embody the icon of cool that she had already become: “Under no circumstances/I would want to have/The reflexes of unhappiness.” »
Indeed, her cult of solitary and unwavering sadness would keep her away from mass solidarity movements, rejecting what she called “the intolerances of the left” and later turned her towards right-wing affinities with people like Nicolas Sarkozy, the former French president, or the misanthropic writer Michel Houellebecq.
A damaged childhood with a single mother led Ms. Hardy to seek refuge in inner exploration, through songwriting. Like her said Le Monde in 2016: “I am incapable of concealing and lying. Writing a song, on the other hand, forces you to dig deeper into what you experienced and felt. Songwriting, she said, was “an outlet.”
