Céline Dion has returned to Paris. It is true that she briefly did so during the opening ceremony of the 2024 Olympic Games, where she performed the song Hymne à l’amour by Édith Piaf from the Eiffel Tower. But this time it is a monstrous comeback: 26 concerts in eight months.
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This Saturday begins a residency that has sparked extraordinary demand among the French. Around nine million people registered for the presale of tickets. That is, 13% of the population – if the international quota is excluded – wore out their fingertips pressing F5 on their computers for hours to get a ticket. Something completely unusual, while something similar is happening in London, but to see the Bayeux Tapestry. In the end, there will be 16 dates between September and October 2026 at the Plenitude Arena in Nanterre and another 10, scheduled for May 2027. Today, 30,000 spectators are already expected.
The city is covered with photos, posters, and slogans related to the singer. The excitement is so great that this Friday, in the Place de la Bataille-de-Stalingrad, in the 19th district, thousands of people gathered to sing in a giant free karaoke dedicated to the Canadian, organized by the Paris City Hall. Wigs, stage dresses, black glasses, phones raised, and above all, thousands of voices trying to reach the impossible notes of My Heart Will Go On.
Friday’s party, in which the mayor of Paris, Emmanuel Grégoire, also participated, says a lot about what her return means for France. “I’m going to sing very discreetly, you won’t understand anything because unfortunately, like many Céline fans, I sing very badly and it’s very difficult,” Grégoire confessed with laughter. It’s not just about one of the great voices of popular music performing again. It’s about an artist who is part of the country’s sentimental memory, even if she is not French. For many, Céline Dion belongs as much to the repertoire of great international ballads as to Francophone song. Her album D’eux, released in 1995 and largely written by Jean-Jacques Goldman, remains the best-selling Francophone album in history.
Legion of fans
The Quebec singer arrived in Paris on August 28 and since then has been staying at the Royal Monceau hotel, where every day dozens of fans wait for her, shouting her name and celebrating every time the artist approaches to greet them.
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The city has decorated the metro with her lyrics, installed a temporary store of the singer’s products, and turned the eve of her first concert into a popular celebration. In Stalingrad, the fans – perhaps also quite a few people without a better plan for Friday – turned the karaoke into a kind of collective ceremony. “Scan the QR on your phones, they will become microphones and you will all be able to sing the songs at the same time,” shouted the event presenter on stage while the audience launched into the Canadian’s hits without any embarrassment with their phones in hand.
The issue still raises many questions in a society accustomed to a certain cultural elitism, but devoted to the Canadian artist, who has also become a symbol of the gay community. There is no pretense or appearance. It is just a direct identification with people’s lives.
Dion, 58, was the only one from a generation of female superstars of the nineties like Mariah Carey (who now only goes out for Christmas) or Whitney Houston (already deceased) who remained active. But in 2020 she stepped away from the spotlight and took a six-year break after being diagnosed with stiff person syndrome, a rare autoimmune disease that causes violent spasms in the muscles. It affected the Canadian especially in her vocal cords. The triggers are light, noise, crowds. In other words, everything that is part of the diet that Dion feeds on. And so, overnight, she stopped being able to sing and had to cancel the residency she was going to carry out with weekly concerts in Las Vegas (she accepted it because her husband loved gambling), as shown without too many filters in the documentary I Am: Céline Dion, from Amazon. In exchange, she will be 26 nights in Paris.
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