ABSTRACT
Edith Piaf is almost certainly the best-known voice France has ever produced. A December 1999 poll conducted for the newspaper Le Parisien and the television channel La Cinq showed that for 54 per cent of French people she was the ‘singer of the century’; her recording of ‘Milord’ became the first song entirely in a foreign language to enter the British charts; at least two of her other songs, ‘La Vie en rose’ and ‘Non, je ne regrette rien’, form an established part of the ‘standard’ repertoire; she has been the subject of numerous books and of a big-budget feature film, Claude Lelouch’s Edith et Marcel of 1983. Piaf is undoubtedly a ‘star,’ in the sense in which the term is used by Edgar Morin:
