ABSTRACT
This chapter examines three aspects of the musicological and terminological difficulty. First, the semantic instability of the expression chanson francaise; next, the heterogeneity of the music it refers to; finally, the musical diversity of chanson artists. The words "chanson francaise" designate a very different set of songs depending on the position of the speaker. Yeye music, which emerged as of 1960, often appears as a rupture in the history of French popular music. Yeye artists such as Hallyday, Gall, Hardy, Vartan, Claude Francois, Sheila and Mitchell were first seen as foreign to chanson française and symptomatic of a crisis in this music. The stylistic diversity of chanson francaise also comes from the fact that it seems to be blown hither and thither with the winds of musical fashion. From the Second World War on, with the exception of yeye, rock alternatif and chanson neo-realiste, there is hardly anything like a collective style in chanson francaise.
