ABSTRACT
From the 1920s, the French Communist Party promoted a protest poetry which was often sung. Women singers songs on the suffering of low-class city life and the tribulations of love, which moved high- and low-class audiences alike, built one of the most solid and recognizable genres of French popular music to have survived in the twentieth century. In the postwar years French popular music underwent a significant transformation. The chapter argues that in his generic gestures one can see a deeply self-conscious understanding of where the system of French popular music was heading and the importance the genre of the Auteurs-Compositeurs-Interpretes (ACI) would eventually take. The external characteristics that defined the work of the ACI were the singers' tendency to present songs written by themselves and their economical use of orchestration, which was often limited to a single instrument. More internal characteristics were a stylistic consistency and intertextual build-up that gave the impression of a single person's 'oeuvre'.
