Do we like them?

Do we like Édith Piaf?

Our score: 7 out of 10. A decent record and a lot of good done for other singers, held back by a murky wartime stretch and a thin record on her views.

Édith Giovanna Gassion was born in Paris in 1915 to a street-performer father and a singer mother who left to chase her own career. She toured France with her acrobat father, grew up poor, and was singing on the street when cabaret owner Louis Leplée heard her around 1935. He signed her and named her La Môme Piaf, the little sparrow. Her biographer Robert Belleret says she and her entourage helped spread some of the myths about her childhood, including the one about being born on the pavement.

Her first big scandal came fast. Leplée was shot dead in his apartment on 6 April 1936, and police believed mobsters acting on Piaf's orders were behind it. She was arrested, questioned repeatedly and accused of being an accessory to murder, but she was acquitted. Far Out Magazine says there was no evidence for the police theory. The case is still unsolved, and the press had a field day with her. To rebuild her image she worked with lyricist Raymond Asso, who gave her the stage name Piaf and commissioned songs that reflected her street past.

The war is the murky bit. Piaf kept performing in Paris nightclubs that Germans frequented and was invited on a German-sponsored tour to Berlin. After the Liberation she was accused of collaboration, and Complete France reports the accusations were dropped when her secretary, a Resistance member, defended her. A popular legend says she smuggled out forged papers for prisoners of war using souvenir photos. Far Out says details of that are scant, and Belleret rejects her own claim of passing on fake papers. He also says she had no political conscience.

On the harm check, honestly, the record is thin. Nothing turned up of her campaigning against LGBTQ+ people, women, migrants or the planet, and no slide into conspiracy theories. She died in 1963, so there are no modern culture-war posts to dig through. The one real question is the occupation years, and the best-sourced version is a working singer making the most of a bad situation, not a believer in anything dodgy. Nothing new has come up on her lately either, beyond tribute shows and anniversaries.

The good stuff is real. She is widely credited with launching Yves Montand in 1944 and championing Charles Aznavour, who later toured with her. She also gave concerts for French prisoners of war during the occupation. Aznavour said her funeral procession was the only time since the war he had seen Paris traffic come to a standstill, and tens of thousands turned out.

The Catholic Church refused her a funeral Mass, and the Vatican newspaper said she lived in a state of public sin. It took until 2013, the 50th anniversary of her death, for a memorial Mass at the Belleville church where she was baptised. Whatever you think of that, it says plenty about how the establishment saw a working-class woman who lived loudly.