The son of a right-wing insurance clerk, little Jacques enjoyed a relatively happy childhood, despite his father's slow social decline. After dropping out of school at fourteen, he was conscripted in 1920 and went to Syria, where he met another conscript, Marcel Duhamel, the future creator of the "Série noire". Returning to civilian life, he took part with Duhamel and the painter Yves Tanguy in the intense life of Montparnasse in the 20s, and soon met the Surrealists. In 1928, he wrote his first song for a friend, a dance teacher, "Les animaux ont des ennuis". In this nursery rhyme, we already find what was to become Prévert's style, that blend of simplicity, comicality and poetry: "Le pauvre crocodile n'a pas de C cédille/On a mouillé les L de la pauvre grenouille" ("The poor crocodile has no cedilla/Wet the Ls of the poor frog")... In the '30s, he joined the Octobre group, a collective of artists and filmmakers close to the Communist Party. He wrote numerous articles, sketches and poems, some of which, like Pêche à la baleine, became famous songs. Germaine Taillefer, composer of the Groupe des Six, set his "Chanson de l'éléphant" to music, and Marianne Oswald sang his "Embrasse-moi". In 1934, he gave the Secours rouge - a Communist organization - the prophetic text "Il ne faut pas rire avec ces gens-là", in which, against a backdrop of pacifism, he announces: "The next war is about to begin / The day of glory has arrived / We're decorating the slaughterhouses / We're strutting our stuff at the old folks' home." In 1935, he worked with Jean Renoir on the film Le Crime de monsieur Lange, and made the acquaintance of pianist Joseph Kosma, while the very young Agnès Capri performed several of his works at Le Boeuf sur le toit the following year.
Fame. This ushered in the era of the great films Prévert would write as screenwriter and dialogue writer - Quai des brumes, Les Disparus de Saint-Agil, Les Enfants du paradis, Les Amants de Vérone - and the songs Kosma would set to unforgettable music. In 1945, the publication of Prévert's poems in a collection (Paroles) met with enormous success, especially among young people, who, with their new-found freedom, were delighted with his light-hearted writing and humorous anarchism. Kosma's music adapts marvelously to these often irregularly metrical poems, resulting in some of the most beautiful compositions in French chanson - Les Feuilles mortes, Barbara, Les Enfants qui s'aiment, Deux Escargots à l'enterrement, Sanguine - which are covered by the greatest singers, including Yves Montand, Jacques Douai, the Frères Jacques, Mouloudji and Cora Vaucaire. however, "Les Feuilles mortes" was Prévert's only real "mainstream" hit, covered in the U.S. by Nat King Cole, Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra. In 1956, Prévert distanced himself from the Communist movement after the Budapest affair, then supported the "121 Manifesto", opposed to the war in Algeria, without signing it himself. He died in his Normandy village, where he was buried and joined fifteen years later by his old friend and neighbor, the film set designer Alexandre Trauner.
J. Ch.
