Gainsbourg’s popularity has endured and even increased since his death. His music still speaks to a new generation of French people, even if his personal life struggles to stand up to scrutiny post-#MeToo. Birkin wrote in her diaries that Gainsbourg hit her. He was frequently odious on television, most famously during a drunken 1986 appearance alongside Whitney Houston, in which he slurred that he wanted to sleep with her. He had a notorious Lolita obsession, and he began an affair at the age of 57 with 16-year-old Constance Meyer.
“There are lots of women, feminists, in France who don’t celebrate Gainsbourg at all anymore,” says Chloé Thibaud, a journalist who wrote a book on his literary influences. This month an editorial in the French magazine Philosophie asked “why a man who in theory checks every box to be ‘cancelled,’ still hasn’t been.”
And yet much of French media continues to venerate him — “he only became a genius after his death” explains biographer Bertrand Dicale — and last week fans flocked to the opening of his former home as part of a new cultural site called Maison Gainsbourg. On the opposite side of the street at number 14 is an accompanying museum about his life and career, but it’s the house that is the real draw, and tickets for it have sold out until the end of the year.
“I’ve been waiting for this moment for 30 years,” said Christian (he did not want to give his surname), who had traveled from his home in Cologne, Germany. “It was my father who introduced me to Gainsbourg when I was a teenager,” reminisced Marie-Caroline Ramette, who had come with her partner and daughter. “We all feel like we know him.” “It was extremely moving,” said 22-year-old Aurélia Bardin after visiting the house. “I admit I shed some tears.”
An audio guide begins with Charlotte breathing huskily, “Come with me, I have a key.” The famous front room is the main exhibit: This is where Gainsbourg would drag in police officers to chat late at night, persuading them to hand over their badge or their handcuffs. “It thrilled him to take stuff from the police,” Charlotte explains. Rows of these badges crowd a glass table at one end, alongside more bizarre bric-a-brac: a troop of red-waistcoated toy monkeys, a bronze bust he had made of Birkin’s body, a drinks cabinet in the shape of a walnut and in the corner, a ghoulish life-size anatomical model, its sinews and muscle accentuated by the low light. Because that’s the other thing about the house: Gainsbourg covered the walls in black felt, and it makes the atmosphere hot and dark, the walls pressing in.
Gainsbourg, who smoked five packs of unfiltered Gitanes cigarettes a day and was rarely seen without a glass of pastis in hand near the end of his life, died from his second heart attack in the bedroom upstairs. Charlotte’s narration is appropriately funereal: “This was the house of a solitary man who didn’t like solitude,” she intones, directing the visitor to notice her father’s absence in the still-visible depression on the couch where he used to sit. She made sure the house was not touched after his death, suspending it forever in 1991. Three Snickers bars, one half-eaten, are still in the fridge. All of the windows are closed and no natural light leaks in, to preserve the objects and furniture. The effect is half haunted house, half place of worship.
Maison Gainsbourg is an extension of the Gainsbourg myth — Dicale calls it an unapologetic “self-portrait.” The singer‘s carefully crafted dandy aesthetic, inspired by the 19th-century novels that he loved so much, leached its way into every corner of his life. Under Birkin’s influence, he created a new sartorial language. Show any French person his typical uniform — white Zizi Repetto brogues, jeans, a khaki shirt unbuttoned in a low V under a tailored pinstripe women’s jacket — and they’ll recognize it as his.
“He was one of the first people to be a media animal. He knew how to play with his character for the media and how to make a buzz,” explains Thibaud. The house is an almost caricatural expression of Gainsbourg’s dedication to his image, even to the point of absurdity, like an enormous glass chandelier that hangs stupidly low in the center of the bathroom. Charlotte remembers that she used to measure her height by its lowest glass orb, noticing when it started to skim her head as a child.
The tour doesn’t shy away from private, even grotesque detail. When visitors reach the gothic bedroom, with its low bed draped in black fur and a flamboyant golden bench at the foot in the shape of a swooning mermaid, Charlotte describes how she found her father’s dead body here, with Kate Barry and Bambou. “We lay down beside him and time stopped,” she says, adding simply, “People came to embalm him, so we could stay longer.”
The museum part of Maison Gainsbourg is a more traditional telling of the Gainsbourg myth. Along a corridor draped in black like the apartment, it takes a highly detailed, chronological look at his life and career.
Born Lucien Ginsburg in Paris in 1928, Gainsbourg gained notoriety in the 1960s with the hits he wrote for pop stars like Brigitte Bardot, France Gall, Anna Karina and most famously Birkin, whose scandalously orgasmic moans made “Je t’aime … moi non plus” an international No. 1. He cycled through different genres across his career, some more successful than others, writing jazz, pop, Afro-Cuban music, reggae and funk — 1971’s groovy “Histoire de Melody Nelson” (a concept album about an affair between a middle-aged man and a 15-year-old girl) has been widely sampled by dance and hip-hop artists. He drew the ire of nationalists after committing lèse-majesté against the French national anthem when he rewrote it as a reggae song. Dicale points out that the albums now considered major classics were not commercial successes, and even in the last part of his life, he was “an extremely divisive character.”
Maison Gainsbourg does not entirely ignore Gainsbourg’s problematic side, but it does skirt round it. “I made an effort to make sure that nothing was swept under the rug, that nothing was hidden. But I did think it was important to emphasize the beautiful parts of his work, rather than the ugly bits,” admits Sébastien Merlet, the museum’s curator.
For a foreign audience, it can be hard to understand why the French public didn’t fall out of love with him. Part of it may be his poetry: Former French president François Mitterand eulogized him as “our Baudelaire, our Apollinaire.” Part of it may be the fact that he was simply there. “His songs accompanied great changes in French society, from the sexual revolution to discussions about nationalism,” says Merlet. “He always took a provocative stance with big societal issues, to try and change people’s mentalities.” For better or worse, the music and the man epitomized each decade. The Gainsbourg myth lives on.