Like all poets, who are considered unique and incomparable, he drew from a multitude of sources, many of which had been more or less thoroughly forgotten.
He studied the medieval troubadour poetry of southern France, where he was born in 1922, read the works of William IX.
von Occitania, by François Villon, Rabelais and Verlaine, mixed the formal severity of classical poetry with the licentiousness of Parisian street language, whose anarchistic humor he loved just as much as he admired and imitated its linguistic creativity.
Hubert Spiegel
Editor in the Feuilleton.
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He mocked the bourgeoisie and all authorities, drove the clergy before him with his verses, frightened the prudish and the correct with his drastic eroticism and wrote one declaration of love after another: to women, young and old, to proletarians and petty bourgeoisie , to the unskilled and the exploited, the unsuspecting and the naive, the sly and the motherly wise and to all those who value friendship, loyalty, solidarity and compassion.
He could mourn for the unlived, missed, life gone too quickly, for the lost love, for the wasted happiness, for the missed opportunity, for everything that was over and would never return.
Like all great poets, he could touch hearts so painfully.
For this Georges Brassens was revered and admired in France,
As his translator Gisbert Haefs reports, around fifty streets, squares, libraries, theaters and parks are named after the singer, as are 149 schools and educational institutions.
Reinhard Mey, Hannes Wader, Franz Josef Degenhardt, Dieter Süverkrüp and all the other German singer-songwriters who were influenced by Brassens will have noted with approval, but probably not entirely without envy: the veneration that France had for its great chanson singers and Chansonniers like Edith Piaf, Barbara, Jacques Brel, Charles Aznavour or Léo Ferré always brought up, has no equivalent in Germany.
Brassens was, as Haefs writes, the classic or classicist among them.
When a survey in the 1960s asked about the country's most important identification figures,
His German colleagues in the 1960s and 1970s “made songs” – you have the workbench in mind when you hear the term singer-songwriter – Georges Brassens sang poems.
In 1967, the Académie française awarded the Grand Prix de Poésie to the school dropout, who had left his hometown of Sète for Paris in 1939 and initially worked as a laborer in the Renault works.
More recognition from the cultural establishment for a non-conformist who gave concerts for the benefit of the Fédération Anarchiste and was still able to win such a majority that he sold more than thirty million records and CDs is hardly conceivable.