Cherished as the summit of the composer's work and a masterpiece by musical critics, the cantata is a hymn to Liberté, victorious over tyranny.

The meeting of Francis Poulenc and Paul Éluard dates from 1916 or 1917[JM 1] during the First World War, at the Parisian bookstore of his friend Adrienne Monnier.

In the Entretiens avec Claude Rostand, he specifies "Some privileged persons, of whom I was one, had the comfort of receiving morning letters, marvellous typed poems, below whose names we guessed the signature of Paul Éluard.

[H 2] Poulenc rented a small two-room apartment in Beaulieu-sur-Dordogne and began composing a violin concerto at the request of Ginette Neveu but quickly abandoned this work.

[H 3] Figure humaine was premiered in English by the BBC Chorus under their director Leslie Woodgate on Palm Sunday, 25 March 1945,[2][note 1] then in Brussels (Belgium) in French on 2 December 1946 by the Chœurs de la radiodiffusion flamande under the direction of Paul Collaer.

[H 1] However, the composition of the double chorus makes its execution difficult, and the work was only resumed on 27 May 1959 at salle Gaveau in Paris for the composer's 60th anniversary.

[M 3] The cantata is written for a double mixed choir and twelve real parts[M 1] and is divided into eight movements: This first song is of a duration of 2 minutes 40.

If the cantata conjugates the emotions, regret, pain, violence, sadness, it is tenderness that emerges from Toi ma patiente[H 1] for the first solo chorus.

Considered by Renaud Machart as the most moving passage in the cantata, this song is a melody shedding "on a harmony of splendid simplicity".

[H 7] The final bars are notoriously challenging, with the highest soprano in each chorus required to hit an E6 at the work's climactic conclusion.