Words of Love in Songs by Edith Piaf

Abstract

All her life, she sought love and sang about it. Édith Giovanna Gassion, known as Édith Piaf, recorded over 300 songs in which love has a special place. Just look at the titles of her songs to understand the meaning of love in the texts interpreted by Piaf: “J’ai dansé avec l’amour”, “C’était une histoire d’amour”, “La vie, l’amour” or “l’Hymne à l’amour”. In our article, we propose to analyze the place and contexts of using the noun love and the verb to love in the lyrics of songs written by Édith Piaf herself and by other authors of the lyrics who worked for her. This diagnostic study will make it possible to identify the entire lexicon linked to the words love and to love, to analyze their importance in Piaf’s work and to make a proposal with a didactic objective. The linguistic analysis will be supplemented with didactic reflection on the possibility of using songs about love from Piaf’s repertoire during French lessons as a foreign language.