She was the only French singer on Rolling Stone’s 2023 list of the 200 best singers of all time.
Ms. Hardy’s ethereal, almost frail voice expressed a particular kind of French youthful ennui while becoming fuller with the years. She sang of love sought and not found, of love lost, of time passing, of hopes unfilled, to words written by herself, by the French pop legend Serge Gainsbourg and even by the Nobel Prize-winning novelist Patrick Modiano (who wrote, in the song “Etonnez-moi, Benoit,” “Astonish-me, Benedict, walk on your hands, swallow some pine cones, Benedict”).
Ms. Hardy captured the melancholy of her generation, born, like her, at the end of World War II and, like her, unsatisfied by France’s material progress in the decades after, in the “Trente Glorieuses,” or “30 Glorious Years.”
That youthful discontent, anticipated by the Existentialists — she was sometimes considered their pop-singer adept — exploded in the demonstrations in France of May 1968, when her fame was at its peak, though she disapproved of them and fled to her retreat in Corsica. The words Mr. Gainsbourg wrote for her that year in incarnated the icon of cool she had already become: “Under no pretext/Would I want to have/The reflexes of unhappiness.”
Indeed, her cult of steely, solitary sadness would keep her well shy of movements of mass solidarity, rejecting what she called “the intolerances of the left” and steering her later toward right-leaning affinities with the likes of Nicolas Sarkozy, the former French president, or the misanthropic writer Michel Houellebecq.
A damaged childhood with a single mother led Ms. Hardy to seek refuge in inner exploration, through songwriting. As she told Le Monde in 2016: “I am incapable of dissimulating and lying. Writing a song, on the contrary, forces you to go deep into what you have lived, and felt.” Songwriting, she said, was “an outlet.”
