Désenchantée
by Mylène Farmer
How to study this song
Learning “Désenchantée” means 66 entries at B2+ — 30 French words, 7 adjectives and 29 verb forms, every one taken from what the song actually says. Start with the glossary: eaux, lendemains and fin come up again and again, so they are the ones to know first. This one leans on its verbs: 29 distinct forms against 7 adjectives, so conjugation is where the effort goes. At this level the words on their own are not the problem — it is the way they are put together that takes the work.
The words of this song, in several languages
Every word below is taken from this song and translated by us. Nothing here is the lyric itself — these are the individual words you need in order to follow it.
Vocabulary
| FR | EN | ES | IT | PT | NL | DE |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| eaux | waters | aguas | acque | águas |
What this song teaches you
Level · B2+
- Vocabulary words
- 30
- Adjectives
- 7
- Word combos
- 8
- Expressions
- 10
- Verb forms
- 29
- Quiz questions
- 35
Background
About the song
«Désenchantée» was released on 18 March 1991 as the first single from «L’Autre…», Mylène Farmer’s third studio album, which followed in April. As on everything she recorded in those years, the roles were split in two: Farmer wrote the words and Laurent Boutonnat composed and produced the music. The track was recorded at the Studio Méga in Paris, with the American singers Debbie Davis and Carole Fredericks on backing vocals, and it pairs a bright, danceable synth-pop arrangement — piano, heavy percussion, a chorus built to be sung by a crowd — with a lyric that is one of the darkest ever to top the French charts.
The song is a portrait of drift and exhaustion. In the verses the narrator seems suspended rather than alive: she floats, she waits, she wonders whom she could turn to, and she admits that the only rest she has ever found came from no longer caring. She would like to recover a lost innocence, but nothing around her makes sense any more. The chorus widens the picture from one person to a whole age group. She describes her ideals and even her words as damaged, says she is searching for a soul able to help her, and names herself as a member of a disillusioned generation. The second verse turns to death, faith and reason collapsing, and ends with a shrug of defiance towards heaven itself.
Farmer drew the mood from the Romanian philosopher Emil Cioran, whose early book «Sur les cimes du désespoir» (1934) is a long essay on despair, insomnia and the refusal of consolation. The timing did the rest. The single arrived during the Gulf War and a wave of student protests in France, and many listeners heard it as a comment on the moment — a young generation that felt it had inherited a broken world. Farmer herself always resisted that reading and insisted that the song spoke only about her own feelings, not about politics.
For a learner, «Désenchantée» is a compact lesson in how French talks about states of mind. The first lines are built from bare infinitives with no subject at all, which turns actions into a condition. The verses use the subjunctive to express a wish, the conditional to say what she would like, the future to imagine who might help, and the restrictive «ne … que» to say that something happened only in one way. It also packs in several idioms that every French speaker knows: falling from a great height when a hope collapses, not knowing which saint to pray to when you have no one left, and sailing into headwinds.