He was already Commander of the Legion of Honor, Knight of Arts and Letters, Commander of the Golden Crescent of the Grand Mosque of Paris… and in a few weeks next June will be elevated to the rank of Grand Officer of the National Order of Merit. Michel Sardou, popular singer, – he sang Les bals populaire and J’habite en France in the early 1970s – will therefore be decorated next June by Emmanuel Macron, President of the Republic and guardian of this order created by General de Gaulle in 1963.
This new distinction, which delights the singer’s fans, raised eyebrows, particularly among feminists, who saw it as an encouragement to a form of machismo that the singer-songwriter of Bonsoir Clara had fun describing at the start of his career. . Faced with this outcry, led in particular by the environmentalist MP Sandrine Rousseau who sees this new promotion as “a scandal”, Rachida Dati, the recently appointed Minister of Culture in the Attal government, felt obliged to go to the front to defend Michel Sardou. She fired a first arrow at our colleagues at Nouvel Obs by declaring: “Obviously he has a temperament, he has a character. He was not indicted for behavior towards women.”
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For the politician, it is the entire career of Michel Sardou – who has been in charge since Les Ricains almost 60 years ago – that this rank of Grand Officer of Merit today honors: “He had a great career, he is a great artist. He is someone who has lived the lives of a large majority of French people. That the nation pays tribute to him, I find that quite legitimate.”
As for Emmanuel Macron, he did not hide the fact that he knew Sardou’s work. He regularly repeats the stanzas of Vladimir Ilitch and he recently cited The Two Schools to try to put an end to the Amélie Oudéa-Castéra affair, the very short-lived Minister of Education. In truth, he is not the first President of the Republic to appreciate the sung prose of Fernand Sardou’s son. François Mitterrand during a lunch with him said: “I am not dead, I am sleeping. Very good song. And it was he, the first socialist of the Fifth Republic who was the first to make him Knight of the Legion of Honor in 1993….