The song “Le temps des cerises” is closely linked to the history of the Paris Commune. This love song was composed by Jean-Baptiste Clément five years before the tragic events of spring 1871. Written in 1866, in an inn in the Oise, while he was leaving for Belgium, the song is part of a very French genre renewed from century to century: romance expressing in poetic terms a heartache. “Le temps des cerises” is a pretty and melancholy love song which was a real success in its time and which remains, moreover, a century and a half later, the only composition which has escaped the oblivion of a otherwise quite verbose author.
Jean-Baptiste Clément had nevertheless drawn from his experience of Communard another song, really committed, this one: “the bloody week”. But posterity preferred to keep the memory of a popular song.
Lydia FABIEN, singer and actress, who runs the association Stage Arc in Issy-les-Moulineaux, tells us the story of this song whose cultural equipment at Fort d’Issy bears the name.
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