Chanson réaliste

Chanson réaliste, the French realist song, was a style of popular singing that flourished from the 1880s until the end of the Second World War, in which performers, overwhelmingly women, sang of the Parisian poor: prostitutes, pimps, apaches, orphans, soldiers' mothers and the abandoned. Created in the Montmartre cabarets by *Aristide Bruant*, who wrote in street slang under the influence of literary naturalism, the genre was defined by the chanteuses réalistes, *Damia*, *Fréhel* and *Édith Piaf* among them, who performed in black dresses against bare stages, delivering melodramatic narratives of loss, crime and hopeless love with intense, theatrical expression.