No Regrets

Édith Piaf was born Édith Giovanna Gassion in December 1915 in Belleville, a working-class district of Paris.

The First World War had already claimed hundreds of thousands of men, and the city was stretched by food shortages, grief, and the disarray of families divided by conscription. Her father, a soldier-turned-acrobat, was often away.

Her mother, a café singer, abandoned her in infancy. She was sent to Normandy, to her grandmother’s brothel, where prostitutes became her earliest caretakers.

Piaf went blind from keratitis at age three and recovered her sight four years later, after her grandmother took her on a pilgrimage to Saint Thérèse of Lisieux. The child who would one day command Paris stages was small, fragile, often ill. As an adult she would stand only four feet eight inches tall.

The sobriquet La Môme Piaf—the little sparrow—was coined by Louis Leplée, the nightclub owner who discovered her at 17, singing with her father on the street. He dressed her in black, put her under a single spotlight, and told her to sing.

After Leplée’s murder in 1936, Piaf nearly vanished into obscurity. It was Raymond Asso, a songwriter and former legionnaire, who caught her before she vanished. He signed her, commissioned new material, and imposed a discipline she had never known: in time the voice was leaner, edged, yet entirely hers.

When the war came, the cabarets of Paris continued to open their doors. Piaf sang to them—soldiers, civilians, men and women carrying ration cards and grief. She travelled widely, including to Vichy France and to Germany—choices that were dubious, but after the Liberation, she insisted she had helped French prisoners of war escape, passing forged identity papers hidden among her concert photographs.

Whether apocryphal or true, the claim clung to her, as though the voice people had heard in those dark rooms had been about reaching the vulnerability about her.

Piaf began to write her own lyrics—a rare act for a female performer in the 1930s and 40s. Piaf’s words La Vie En Rose (1945) came as reprieve to post-war Paris:

“Quand il me prend dans ses bras/Il me parle tout bas, Je vois la vie en rose.”

(When he takes me in his arms/And speaks softly, I see life in rose pink.)

A single woman’s private lament for her lover had been translated into a global dialect. It was literature in its rawest form. Into a France climbing out of occupation and war—rationing still in place, cities scarred, families hollowed by dead soldiers—Piaf’s lyric arrived as a promise of renewal.

By the 1950s, Piaf’s voice had crossed borders. She was selling hundreds of thousands of records, the first French chanteuse to break into the American market. She appeared at Carnegie Hall in 1956 and 1957, sang eight times on The Ed Sullivan Show, and toured Europe, South America, and the Middle East.

La Vie En Rose became a global phenomenon, recorded by artists from Louis Armstrong to Grace Jones. The song sold in the millions. Its endurance lies in its candour. Each time it is sung—whether by Piaf at the Étoile in 1950, or Céline Dion on the Eiffel Tower in 2024—it carries the same promise of tenderness. She sang it through grief, and that made it poignant.

In 1950, she wrote Hymne à l’amour for Marcel Cerdan—the boxer lost in a plane crash in 1949—for whom she had never stopped mourning.

“Si un jour la vie t’arrache à moi,

Si tu meurs que tu sois loin de moi…

Peu m’importe si tu m’aimes,

Car moi je mourrai aussi.”

(If one day life tears you away from me,

If you die while far from me…

It matters little, if you love me,

For I will die too.)

She kept singing, her voice her lifeline, to widening acclaim. But her ascent was punishing. Even as Piaf’s spirit and body was pushed past its limits, in 1951 she was hurled through a windshield in a crash that broke ribs. In 1959, in Morocco, another collision shattered her bones. Her body never recovered from: broken bones would not heal, fractures left her smaller, stooped, her hands twisted… Her frame withered, her voice thinned. Each performance carried the risk of collapse, and still she went back to the lights.

The child abandoned in Belleville, the woman who buried lovers and friends, the addict who needed morphine to rise from bed, alcohol to sleep. But the stage called and she met it. It’s why Jean Cocteau called her “a genius.”

She married Jacques Pills, later Théo Sarapo, 20 years her junior, with whom she recorded L’Homme de Berlin in 1963.

Piaf’s private life was rarely private. Lovers arrived and departed, marriages came undone, and grief settled in as a permanent guest.

Piaf lived it in the glare of newspapers, but the pattern was ordinary and recognisable:

Women everywhere know something of this—of love shadowed by loss, searching for permanence in others and finding only fracture, of bodies that must endure more than they can carry, of wanting to belong but refusing to be contained. That fracture gave her voice its timbre.

She carried that unresolved inheritance into her art. The morphine, the drinking, the compulsive lovers—each a replay of abandonments, by parents, overs she had never accepted. What looked like self-destruction was also survival through song: the need to relive what she could not resolve, to pour it into her voice, rocks of hurt smashed into gravelly song, recognisable by anyone who lived with pain. The voice belonged to her, and she gave it away. By turning private ruin into lyric, forcing audiences to witness what most conceal, as a writer whose material was herself—wound and will alike.

Édith Piaf’s legacy rests in this strange intimacy: she sang as though each audience, each listener had been given a private letter, a confession written for no one’s eyes, and received by everyone.

In 1960, Piaf was given the song she said she had been waiting for all her life: Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien, by Charles Dumont and Michel Vaucaire. It turned out to be not just her anthem but of millions of women everywhere.

“Non, rien de rien,

Non, je ne regrette rien,

Ni le bien qu’on m’a fait,

Ni le mal; tout ça m’est bien égal.”

(No, nothing at all,

No, I regret nothing,

Neither the good people have done me,

Nor the bad; it is all the same to me.)

Édith Piaf died on October 10, 1963, in Plascassier, on the French Riviera. She was 47, bankrupt, worn out by morphine, cirrhosis, and cancer, but her songs were already immortal. Her body was returned to Paris, and her funeral shut the city down. Over 100,000 people lined the streets, spilling into the Père Lachaise cemetery. The French Catholic Church had refused her a funeral mass, but ordinary Parisians, singers, writers, and strangers gave her a secular canonisation in the streets.

As a writer and performer of her own survival, and her own undoing, Édith Piaf regretted nothing.

Her story was brought to a new generation in La Vie En Rose (2007), the biopic starring Marion Cotillard. Cotillard’s performance won the Academy Award for Best Actress—the first Oscar ever awarded for a French-speaking role.