Paris really, really loves Céline Dion
By CATHERINE PORTER and GIULIA IMBERT
Paris hasn’t just opened its arms to Céline Dion.
It has declared its fevered, undying love for her.
After the coronavirus pandemic disrupted her last tour and then illness prevented her return, Dion, the French Canadian diva, is finally back in the French capital. Her arrival, for a 16-date residency through October, has been greeted with a citywide frenzy, spurring Céline Dion sing-alongs, Céline-themed Seine cruises and no fewer than eight tribute bands heading around the country to perform her songs.
The lyrics of songs she has sung have been plastered on street posts and subway walls and, in one breathtaking case, etched onto a golden cauldron that was installed for the Olympics in 2024 beside the Louvre Museum. Emmanuel Grégoire, the mayor of Paris, announced that the city was hosting two giant “Paris Sings Céline” karaoke events with a social media post capturing him working at his desk while singing her 1995 song “Prière païenne,” or “Pagan Prayer.” And every day, the crowd of fans waiting to cheer her outside her hotel seems to grow.
The national newspaper Le Monde has compared the fever to Beatlemania.
Even Line Basbous, the president of an international Céline Dion fan club, said that over her decades of intense fandom, she had “never experienced this before.”
“It’s an unprecedented outpouring of passion,” said Basbous, who figures she has been to 50 Céline Dion concerts.
Some in France were first introduced to Dion when she was just 14 as she appeared in 1983 on the country’s top variety television show. Still, it took years for her to break through to the larger French public, said Clément Lagrange, author of “Céline Dion and France: A Love Story.”
The turning point came in 1995, when Dion was already a star in the United States. That year, she brought out an entire album of French songs, composed for her by an iconic French musician, Jean-Jacques Goldman.
The album, D’Eux, sold more than 1 million copies in four months in France. It remains the bestselling French-language album in history.
Suddenly, her face was on the covers of all the major French newspapers, magazines and talk shows, Lagrange said.
“Her name was on everyone’s lips; her songs were playing on the radio,” he said. “She became inescapable.”
Dion released a second album with many of Goldman’s songs in 1998 — the same year the film “Titanic,” which featured her singing “My Heart Will Go On,” swept the Oscars. That year, she was also among the first musicians to fill the 90,000-seat Stade de France.
Her French songs, though relatively unknown in English-speaking North America, formed the soundtrack to everyday life in France in the 1990s, said Annabelle Coquart, 46, a child protection worker who belted out Céline Dion songs with hundreds of other fans at the first city-sponsored karaoke event.
One song brought Coquart back to being dumped as a teenager, she said. Another, about the death of Dion’s niece, was played at the funerals of two of Coquart’s grandparents, she said.
“We all share intimate memories with her,” Coquart said.
Many French fans thought they would never see Dion perform live again. She announced in 2022 that she had stiff person syndrome, a rare neurological condition that caused painful muscle spasms, including constrictions of her vocal cords.
In 2024, just weeks after the release of an intimate documentary about that debilitating illness, she sang a song at the opening ceremony of the Olympics in Paris. She appeared in a sparkling, bead-encrusted white gown on the Eiffel Tower, standing beside a rain-soaked piano and gripping a microphone. People watched in awe as she performed “Hymne à l’amour,” or “Hymn to Love,” a soaring French anthem penned by Édith Piaf, as the final song of the ceremony.
“I was overcome with emotion,” said Denis Diatourou Griponne, 43, an event planner who put on a Céline Dion karaoke event with his sister on the eastern edge of Paris this month. “I cried. Everyone did.”
Anthony Cayer, 37, said that before the Olympics appearance, he loved the Canadian star for her stirring voice, her emotional transparency and her down-to-earth openness.
“Today, I love her because of her resilience — I’m so impressed, the way she has been able to collapse and be reborn,” Cayer, a tax manager, said. He added, “That was likely the switch — the moment when she went from being tacky for many people to an icon.”
On a recent night, Cayer mingled with dozens of fellow fans in central Paris outside a record store converted into a Céline Dion celebration site.
Many shouted in joy and hugged. Some hadn’t seen one another since Dion last made a solo tour of France in 2017, or even before, they said. Many events around the city have had a similar flavor of reunion.
“It was a terrible break,” Basbous, the fan club leader, said of the gap since Dion’s last tour. “To me, that was one of the reasons contributing to this fervor.”
Millions tried to buy tickets for the concerts, the official ticket sellers said. In response, the star added a round of 10 more concerts in Paris in May.
The government office promoting tourism in the Paris region said it expected Dion’s 26 concerts to generate up to roughly $920 million in economic benefits for the city.
But fans seemed more moved by the fact of Dion’s presence than by how much money the tour would bring to the city.
“With everything she’s been through, you can have billions, whatever, Dior, Hermès, all that stuff — we don’t give a damn about that,” said Jannick Galmiche, 54, a fan in the crowd outside her hotel.
Since Dion arrived late last month, the crowd has become such a constant and growing fixture that the police are often dispatched to manage the traffic.
Dion has not disappointed the fans, often stopping to speak with them. Videos have spread of her dancing to their regular serenades and singing along with them.
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