Do we like them?

Do we like Serge Gainsbourg?

Our score: 3 out of 10. A real artistic spine and some nerve, but a sexually explicit TV remark, a song critics say glamorised abuse and serious accounts of how he treated women outweigh it.

Gainsbourg was the Parisian who, in 1979, turned France's national anthem into a reggae track and watched half the country lose its mind. Soldiers reportedly threatened to beat him up if he performed it live, and protesters from the army interrupted a concert. He kept playing and said “The true meaning of our national anthem is revolutionary.” That nerve is a big part of why France still loves him.

Then there is Whitney Houston. In 1986, on the French show Champs-Élysées, a drunken Gainsbourg, then 58, sat beside the 22-year-old star, kissed her hand and said on air, in English, that he wanted to have sex with her, then repeated it in French. Host Michel Drucker tried to talk over it and later said Houston was furious, and he took flowers to her hotel to apologise. Years later the two reportedly laughed about it in Monaco, but that does not make the moment any better.

The bigger stain is the 1984 song and video Lemon Incest, which critics said glamorised incest and abuse. When Les Lilas floated naming a new Métro station after him in 2023, a petition with over 4,000 signatures called him a “notorious misogynist”. The Daily Beast reported that author Bertrand Dicale said it has long been known that Gainsbourg beat his girlfriends, and that nobody has publicly accused him of sexual assault or rape.

The good stuff is thin on what we could verify. We found no charity work or kind acts to set against the record, and the courage to stand up to ex-soldiers over an anthem is about artistic defiance more than helping anyone. That is honestly the whole list from our sources, so the meter stays low.

So: would we support him? His music is hard to shake, but the alleged treatment of women, the Houston moment and that 1984 song mean this is not someone to hold up as a hero. Keep the records if you like, and be clear-eyed about the man.