Three Homeless Years Before Becoming a French Pop Icon

Michel Polnareff is a French singer and songwriter whose songs have been part of the country's pop landscape since the mid-1960s. Before that success, though, came a very different period of his life.

In a 2022 interview with Elle magazine, reported by the Belgian public broadcaster RTBF, he described that earlier chapter in plain terms. He said he left his parents' home at the age of 17 and then lived without a home for three years. He described his father as a harsh figure, although the article gives no further detail about what happened at home or why he left.

Polnareff said those years ended with him on the steps of Montmartre, the hilltop district of Paris. The report does not describe exactly how or when he found a way off the street, and it does not fill in the gaps with guesses. What it does record is his own conclusion about the experience: that nearly everything he learned in life, he learned in the street.

The interview came as he was promoting an album of new recordings of his own songs and preparing a tour that included a stop in Brussels in 2023. Watching old footage of himself, he said he found his younger self courageous and thought well of the young man he had been.

His story is a reminder that a career as celebrated as his can begin from a very uncertain start, and that he chose, decades later, to speak about it openly.