Jean Ferrat - My France

Original Title: "Ma France"
Year: 1969

From plains to forests, from small valleys to hills
From spring yet to be born to your dead seasons
From what I have seen to what I imagine
I'll never finish writing your song,
My France

To the big summer sun that bends the Provence
from the Britany's brooms to the Ardèche's heathers
Something in the air has that transparency
and that taste of happiness that makes my lip dry
My France

That tune of freedom beyond the borders
to the foreign people that gave vertigo
and from which you usurp the prestige today
She still answers to the name of Robespierre
My France

The one of the old Hugo holding from his exile
five year old children working in the mines
The one who built with her own hands your factories
The one whom Mr Tiers has said "Let's shoot her"
My France

Picasso holds the world at the end of his palette
from the lips of Eluard doves are taking off
They do not stop your artists prophets
to say that it's time that the adversity succumbs
My France

Their voices increase to only make one
The one that always pays for your crimes, your mistakes
by filling History and its communal graves
That I sing for ever the one of the workers
My France

The one that only owns in gold her white nights
For the stubbon fight of that daily time
From the newspaper that is sold the morning of a sunday
To the poster you paste at the wall of the following day
My France

Whether she comes up from the mines, goes down from the hills
The one that sings in me the beautiful, the rebellious
She holds the future tight in her slender hands
The one of thirty six to sixty eight stars
My France