De Gaillande … has faithfully translated Brassens’s lyrics into English, preserving both their raunchiness and their defiance.

The person who taught me the most about ethics—more than any priest and for a long time more than any philosopher—was the singer Georges Brassens. Everyone knew he did not believe in God, yet his ethics, though admittedly not in conformity with those of the Vatican, bore the imprint of the Gospels and remained essentially faithful to them, conveying what philosopher Jean-Marie Guyau has described as an ethics 'with neither obligation nor punishment.' Perhaps the songs of Joan Baez, Woody Guthrie or the Beatles played a similar role in the English-speaking world.