During their Christmas shopping, some may have come across a strange object on the shelves of department stores or record stores, sometimes stored in the compilation bin, or in that of gift ideas, sometimes in varieties, sometimes in classical music.
Glory days is a CD-book, which brings together nineteen great speeches emblematic of the French Republic declaimed by performers as varied as Grand Corps Malade, Camélia Jordana, Jane Birkin, Akhenaton, comedian and actress Muriel Robin or actor François Berléand. All set to music by Sébastien Boudria, a teacher at the national music conservatories of Colombes and Clichy-la-Garenne (Hauts-de-Seine).
Published two weeks after the assassination, Friday, October 16, in Conflans-Sainte-Honorine (Yvelines), of history and geography professor Samuel Paty by a terrorist who accused him of showing caricatures of Muhammad to his students, Glory days could have passed for an opportunist act. On the contrary, it is a saving record, which gives its letters of nobility to texts sometimes forgotten such as the postamble of the declaration of the rights of women and of the citizen of Olympe de Gouges (1791), the speech during the debate of the Alexandre Ledru-Rollin’s right to work (1848), that of Hubertine Auclert at the third socialist workers’ congress in Marseille (1879).
There are also the words that have recently resonated in the classrooms with the “Letter to teachers and teachers” (1888), by Jean Jaurès, here said by Oxmo Puccino, or the “Discours sur la misère” (1849), by Victor Hugo, read by actor Michel Aumont (died August 28, 2019). Strong words, unifying, full of hope, that Sébastien Boudria had the idea of putting to music in 2014.
France in its diversity
From a Breton mother, a nurse, and an absent Algerian father, the pianist was born and raised in the Parisian suburbs in Montreuil-sous-Bois (Seine-Saint-Denis). ” A chance, he says, because the town hall being communist, access to culture was very easy. It was the piano for me. ” The 30-something likes to describe himself as “A child of the Republic”, impressed from an early age by the motto on the pediments of schools “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity”. His interest in history comes to him very early thanks to his big sister: “We had offered him Alain Decaux tells children about the French revolution, he recalls, and she read it to me to fall asleep. “
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