The strange and surprising history of Non, Je ne Regrette Rien
If ever a song deserved to be called “iconic” it’s Non, Je ne Regrette Rien, whose composer Charles Dumont has died at the age of 95.
But iconic of what, exactly? A simple answer would be: the singer who made it famous, Édith Piaf. She was herself an icon of that unique, precious, and now long-vanished French form of pop song known as the chanson.
When Dumont and his lyricist Michel Vaucaire visited the famous singer in October 1960 it was their third attempt to persuade her to perform one of their songs. It’s not surprising Piaf had previously ignored the two unknowns. The 45-year-old star was at the top of her game, and was no doubt importuned by innumerable hopeful songwriters. She’d recently sold out Carnegie Hall twice, and had just completed a triumphal international tour. But her health was failing, and she’d collapsed twice on stage from pancreatitis and jaundice. The media, gloomy about her chances of survival, had dubbed it “the suicide tour”.
On that day in 1960, Piaf was feeling grumpy and almost turned Dumont and Vaucaire away. But she relented, and after listening to the song five or six times was in ecstasies. “She said that it was magnificent, wonderful. That it was made for her. That it was her. That it would be her resurrection,” Dumont recalled.
Piaf certainly had much to regret – or not regret. She ricocheted recklessly from one lover to the next, was addicted to alcohol and morphine, and suffered five car crashes in her life, which is an apt symbol of how she lived.
But she was revered because of her very particular French quality of marrying high and low art. The surrealists admired her, and littérateurs with a taste for popular art adored her. The greatest of them, Jean Cocteau, actually died the day after Piaf in October 1963, some say of a broken heart. Piaf herself disclaimed any special depth. “I am a simple person who likes flowers and love affairs,” she once declared, but the depth of her songs suggests this is faux-naiveté more than real innocence.
It’s true that, on the page, this song is simplicity itself. The harmonies wouldn’t be out of place in a Rossini opera aria, until the final cadence when, just for a moment, a Broadway glamour comes over the music, complete with soaring strings. The simplicity of the music throws all the spotlight on Piaf – which is where it should be.
The timing of the song, arriving at a moment of huge upheaval in French politics and society, surely lent it an extra frisson. France’s politics were bitterly polarised between left and right, and the country was mired in a bloody war with its colony Algeria. In October 1961 there was actually a massacre of up to 300 Algerian protesters by the Parisian police. Three years previously, General de Gaulle had had to come out of retirement in 1958 to “save the country”. He too might have declared, looking back on a lifetime dedicated to preserving France’s glory, that he regretted nothing.
The song was an instant hit, and launched the career of Dumont, who went on to write 30 songs for Piaf and numerous other stars of the French chanson including Charles Aznavour. Three years later Piaf died of her numerous illnesses, which gave the song a new poignancy – and not just for the French, who found it hard to believe that she had died (“she hasn’t died, she’s just gone” wrote one grief-stricken journalist). Unlike her earlier songs, which are rooted in gritty French realism, this one, along with a handful of others like La Vie en Rose, quickly acquired a global reach.
Since Piaf’s death, the song has been covered numerous times, in numerous languages, by Shirley Bassey, Elaine Paige, the Italian singer Dalida and others. It had the dubious honour of being quoted by Norman Lamont in 1992 when he took Britain out of the European Exchange Rate Mechanism and has been woven into the scores of many films including the Coen Brothers’ Intolerable Cruelty and Christopher Nolan’s Inception, where it played a key role. It acts as a “kick” that knocks characters out of their dream states, and the film’s composer, Hans Zimmer, wove in numerous references to the song into his score.
It’s a fair bet that many if not most of the song’s fans won’t actually understand the words – but they’ll understand the song’s message nevertheless. Piaf’s ecstatic and despairing recording speaks to anyone who has ever thrown caution to the winds – or would like to.