Pierre Béarn

Who was Pierre Béarn?

Pierre Béarn was a French writer. He was born Louis-Gabriel Besnard in Bucharest, Romania.

He is known to Anglophones for his poem "Couleurs d'usine", which includes the line Métro boulot bistrots mégots dodo zéro

A multifaceted personality - at one time a journalist, novelist, poet, fabulist and humanist, at age nine Béarn began writing in French slang, his "natural" language.

His father having died prematurely, at the age of 14 he became a mechanic to financially support his mother. This working life inspired the poem from which came one of the May 1968 protest slogans "métro-boulot-dodo" that denounced the shocking workers' conditions at the time.

While commanding a trawler to aid the French evacuations in 1940, he was captured and was detained in the concentration camp at Aintree. His poems from that point onwards centred on the sea and the war.

After the war he took a post as a press attaché in Africa. In 1969, he created a quarterly magazine for himself alone: Le Lien. In 1975, he withdrew to Montlhéry where the peace allowed him to write many fables.