Edith Piaf, whose centenary we marked, had Moroccan Berber origins

Edith Piaf was born on 15 December 1915 in the working-class district of Belleville in Paris. The centenary of her birth was the occasion for a host of celebrations that confirmed the singer's special place in the pantheon of French chanson. But did anyone know that the world-famous Piaf had Berber origins?

It is not true that Edith Piaf was of Kabyle Algerian origin. What is true, however, is that her maternal great-grandfather was a Berber born in Mogador (now Essaouira) in 1827 and died in Montluçon, in central France, in 1890.

Saïd Ben Mohammed was a Moroccan circus acrobat. Married to an Italian woman, Marguerite Bracco, née Murazzano, he was the fatther of Emma or Aïcha Saïd Ben Mohamed. The grandmother of the legendary singer also had a career in the circus world. She is said to have been the Moorish dancer in Toulouse-Lautrec's Décor de la baraque de la Goulue (our photo).

The daughter of Emma or Aïcha Ben Saïd, Edith Piaf's mother, Annetta Maillard, sang in famous Parisian cabarets such as the Chat Noir, the Mikado and the Monocle, but did not have the career she undoubtedly deserved and went into a deep descent. Edith Piaf was born into poverty to Louis Gassion, an independent street performer.

Long denied by the French media, Edith Piaf's Berber origins were never hidden by the singer. On the contrary, she always showed a particular attachment to her roots.

Entrusted to the care of her grandmother Emma or Aïcha during the first years of her life, from 1915 to 1918, Edith confessed to having been marked all her life by her grandmother's affection and teachings. Other accounts are less flattering for Piaf's grandmother. Sources claim that she paid little attention to her granddaughter and that her bottles ‘smelt of red wine’.

As fate would have it, little Piaf's greatest love was the boxer Marcel Cerdan, middleweight world champion, whose trainer, Lucien Roupp, later ran an inn near Taroudant, where he found the calm he was looking for.

Having grown up in Morocco from 1922, Marcel Cerdan was nicknamed ‘the Moroccan Bomber’. He disappeared in 1949 in a plane crash over the Azores. Off the coast of Morocco.