Jacques Prévert exemplified the twentieth-century "popular" poet. His work expressed the joys and frustrations of the average man contending with the forces of oppression that seek to overwhelm him. His poetry often takes the form of a scathing...

Cecilia Sarkozy's first husband Jacques Martin was for three decades one of the most popular entertainers on French television. He began in the mid 1970s as a kind of French David Frost, the main figure in Le Petit Rapporteur, a satirical spoof news...

Hier zu Lande war Jacques Dufilho, der 91-jährig am 28. August in Paris gestorben ist, vor allem als Protagonist einer Reihe aufdringlich-schlichter Klamotten bekannt. In Filmen wie "Die tollen Chariots: Frechheit siegt" (1971), "Zu Befehl, Herr Feldwebel" (1973), "Herr Oberst haben eine Macke" (1974)...

Given that [Prévert] interprets his world largely in sharp blacks and whites, it is useful to study Prévert not as a "proletarian" poet, but as an anti-bourgeois and pro-proletariat poet; the one prefix suggests the vitriol that saturates so many poems on capitalism, and the other, the sachet that accompanies the poems written about common people…. It is Prévert's handling of the French language, however, rather than the fierceness of his convictions, that wi...

It is impossible to read many of Prévert's verses without becoming aware that he takes considerable interest in animals. Paroles contains a poem about a whale, a poem about two snails, and four poems about horses. But the author is not so much concerned with animals as he is with birds. Birds are spoken of in many of his poems, and in half a dozen a bird would appear to be the central theme. It seems to me, indeed, that his fondness for birds amounts very nearly to a sort of cult. Préve...

Jacques Prévert, France's most popular poet of the 20th century, died this past spring, and there should be some memorial or festival of his work to mark not his death but his aliveness…. [He was] a man who was on a first name basis with the language of his times: his work was colloquial, as much so as Brecht's, and as deceptively simple. A marvelous three-ring circus of a theater event could be made out of his triplefold writings: his political poetry of World War II and the res...