Pierre Dudan

A Russian family washed up on Lake Geneva

His father, Camille Dudan, a Vaudois born at Les Charbonnières, had gone to teach in Moscow, where he married Hélène Charmanoff, a Russian pianist. Pierre was born there in 1916. Two years later, the family fled the Bolshevik revolution and returned to Switzerland, the mother not speaking a word of French.

Camille Dudan, a man of letters, first ran the schools of Orbe, then, from 1926 to 1932, the Collège de Montreux. The family thus settled on the Riviera, and young Pierre grew up between Lausanne, where his grandparents lived, and Montreux, where he went to school.

The Collège de Montreux, where the writer was born

It was at the Collège de Montreux that Pierre Dudan took to words. His father ran it, and his French teacher was the writer Maurice Budry. A difficult pupil, a stammerer, in rebellion against all authority, he made up for it with a devouring passion for music: self-taught, he learned piano, trumpet, saxophone, guitar and drums.

Jazz became his horizon. At twenty, in 1936, he left Montreux for Paris with, so the legend goes, forty-five francs in his pocket.

Paris, fame, seventeen hundred songs

In Paris, Dudan moved among the greatest cabarets and rubbed shoulders with Trenet, Chevalier, Piaf, Brel, Brassens. He composed “Café au lait au lit”, a universal hit, and “Clopin-Clopant”, taken up by Yves Montand. He also became a storyteller, a specialist in the Vaudois “Ouin-Ouin” tales.

The war sent him back to Switzerland; he sang for the troops. Then a globe-trotting life: London, Africa, Asia, Canada, Polynesia, and Quebec in 1960, where he even lent his face to Major Thompson from Pierre Daninos’s books. He ended up taking the name of the village of Antagnes, above the Riviera, where he owned a house from 1962. He is credited with seventeen hundred songs, and he also wrote novels.

Four marriages and a tender heart

Pierre Dudan was a deeply sensitive man whose heart was often heavy. Married four times, he had five children. While a bronchospasm had left him confined to a wheelchair, he met his last wife, Ariâme, who gave him two sons, in 1973 and 1974, and who kept a wonderful memory of this sexagenarian at last at peace.

What remains

• The Collège de Montreux, on the Rue de la Gare, where he was schooled, still takes in pupils.
• “Clopin-Clopant”, immortalised by Yves Montand, remains his best-known song, the work of a Montreux man.
• He died on 4 February 1984 at Epalinges and rests in the Bois-de-Vaux cemetery in Lausanne.