French singer-songwriter Jean Ferrat died last week (at age 79) and was laid to rest yesterday.

The French media have gushed with appreciation for Ferrat. More a monument than a star, Ferrat’s passing offers French people a possibility to affirm a shared cultural heritage. The commemorations are also tinged with nostalgia: Ferrat’s heyday was in the ’60s and ’70s, when his far-left politics were in vogue. The French mourn Ferrat because, with him, a whole world-view has passed into oblivion.

People often ask how I learned to speak French, born in America to anglophone Americans. I freely confess: Jean Ferrat was one of my teachers. He was one of the best. I collected his albums and listened to them often. They were unlike music I’d heard elsewhere: prominent vocals, clearly sung (only with decades’ hindsight do I realize that his diction, which I remember as lightning-quick, actually is languorous), with retro orchestration and obviously subversive politics.

“Watch out, the cops are everywhere!”, “¡ Cuba sí !”, “Potemkin”, and “Maria” (the Spanish mother whose sons fought on opposite sides of the Spanish civil war). To my ears, this was heady, subversive stuff, and I was thankful it wasn’t sung in English (because I wouldn’t have enjoyed it if it were).

But Ferrat also sang about camaraderie and love and “what would I be without you?” and “how little it is to say I love you” and “how beautiful life is!” Ferrat even sang of dying from love or loving until you lost your mind. Wow. To adolescent ears, this may have been more subversive –and more seductive– than Ferrat’s openly political songs.

Jean Ferrat was a great French teacher. I’m sorry not to have gotten to know him better, and I will miss him.