A petition to stop a suburban Paris metro station being named after Serge Gainsbourg topped 10,000 signatures Thursday, December 14, with critics accusing the late singer of championing misogyny and incest.
Urban transit operator RATP launched construction work in 2016 to extend Paris's metro line 11, with the opening of new stops planned for early 2024. One of those stations is to named after the French singer and actor, the mayor's office in the Paris suburb of Les Lilas announced, an idea backed by Gainsbourg's partner Jane Birkin, who died this year.
But in an online petition launched last month on change.org, a member going by the name of Marie G – who describes herself as a "civil servant and a feminist activist" – protested against the plan, saying Gainsbourg had been "a violent man, a notorious misogynist and a champion of incest." The petition had gathered more than 10,600 signatures by early Thursday afternoon, more than doubling the number of backers since Wednesday.
The decision to name a metro stop after Gainsbourg, who died in 1991, was motivated by the success of his 1959 song "Le Poinçonneur des Lilas," which describes an employee's job at the station that is line 11's terminus.
Over his career, Gainsbourg regularly stoked controversy, including by famously putting the French national anthem to reggae music. Many of his song lyrics included skillfully masked sexual innuendo, or outright references to sex.
Critics have mostly focused on his apparent taste for incest fantasies with his daughter Charlotte, now herself a famous actor and singer, and the song "Lemon Incest" which he recorded with her when she was 13, prompting strong public reactions on publication in 1984. Gainsbourg denied any incest had taken place, saying the song had simply reflected the love between a father and his daughter.
"Still, this work has contributed to a climate in which incest is presented as a loving, sensual and desirable relationship," the petition said. It was "widely known" that Gainsbourg had been "violent towards women" and had "pedo-criminal, even incestuous tendencies," it said. Birkin herself described scenes when Gainsbourg became physically violent with her in her memoir, it said.
Incest was widely discussed in France this autumn when star actor Emmanuelle Béart said in a documentary that she had been a victim of incest. The incest started when Béart was 10 and continued until she was 14, she said. She did not name the abuser, but said it was not her father.
Some 160,000 children become victims of sexual assault every year in France, and 5.5 million French adults suffered sexual abuse during their childhood, according to Ciivise, a government-created commission for the protection of sexual abuse victims.