This October 2025 marks the 104th anniversary of the birth of the late Georges Brassens (22/10/1921 – 29/10/1981), a brilliant French singer-songwriter and guitarist whose work has transcended generations and conquered audiences around the world. With around twenty million records sold during his lifetime, he left behind an exceptional body of work that defined his era and continues to captivate listeners today.
To celebrate this anniversary, What The France presents a brand-new episode of the video series Once Upon a Song. In this episode, Bertrand Dicale (narration) and Dugudus (illustration) revisit the story behind one of the most iconic songs by the legendary artist from Sète, “Chanson pour l’Auvergnat” — the tale of a young man escaping forced labor during World War II who found refuge at the end of a dead-end street in Paris’s 14th arrondissement…
While international artists such as Nina Simone and Iggy Pop chose to perform his songs in French, the universal nature of the Sétois poet’s message allowed many of his works to transcend language barriers. His songs have been reinterpreted in Italian (Fabrizio De André), Hebrew (Yael Naïm), Spanish (Paco Ibañez, Loquillo), German (Franz Josef Degenhardt), English (Jake Thackray, Graeme Allwright, or the Jamaican group Black Uhuru), Finnish (Tuula Amberla), Polish (Justyna Bacz), and Swedish (Thorstein Bergman). They have also been adapted into Japanese, Greek, Russian, Portuguese, Dutch, Czech, and even more unexpected languages such as Catalan, Kabyle, Corsican, and Occitan.
Through our playlist “Georges Brassens Around The World,” What The France invites you to (re)discover a selection of his greatest songs, reimagined by French and international artists.
