Serge Gainsbourg, one of France’s most admired artists, has been denounced as a misogynist and champion of incest by campaigners who want to strip his name from a Paris Metro station, reports The Times.
Several thousand people have signed an online petition against the imminent opening of the Serge Gainsbourg station, a new stop on an extension of line 11 in Les Lilas. The northern district was celebrated in his famous early hit, Le poinçonneur des Lilas (the ticket-puncher of Les Lilas).
The petition says: “Serge Gainsbourg’s violence towards women and his paedophile criminal and even incestuous tendencies (to name but a few) are public knowledge, and we are outraged that he should be honoured in the Paris Metro.”
The affair is the latest episode in France’s #MeToo movement and its embrace of the English-speaking world’s cancellation of past public figures who breached modern moral codes.
The sardonic and often dark love songs of Gainsbourg, who died in 1991 aged 62, remain as popular as ever, even among the young, and he is revered by the older generation as the witty bard of Sixties and Seventies Paris. His Left Bank house has just opened as a museum, with reservations sold out. Les Lilas already has a small park that bears his name and when Jane Birkin, his muse and longtime partner, died in July, Le Monde called the couple “a sort of French royal family”.
Yet the backlash is no surprise. Gainsbourg, the son of Russian immigrants, is loved for his evergreen hits such as La Javanaise and La chanson de Prévert, but he was a provocateur who relished breaching taboo with songs about sex and violence.