His parents, Paulette (Grobermann) and Armand Lanzmann,[1] divorced shortly before World War II and, at the age of 12, he became a farmhand.

Lanzmann was Jewish and, following the Battle of France, he, his mother and his siblings, pretended to be Moroccan Arabs to escape persecution by the Vichy regime.

[2] Lanzmann's father was one of the leading local figures in the rival Mouvements Unis de la Résistance, but Jacques and Claude were not aware of this until February 1944.

[2] While Lanzmann was in Chile, a manuscript of a novel he had written, La glace est rompue ("The ice is broken"), was given to Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir by his brother Claude.

Its commercial success led to him being offered a job as a critic for the Communist literary magazine Les Lettres françaises, edited by Louis Aragon.

On his return, he wrote a third novel, Cuir de Russe, published in 1957, which depicted the extreme poverty of Russian peasants that he had witnessed during his visit.

[4] Lanzmann continued to write novels and, in 1959, wrote his first adapted screenplay, Le Travail c'est la liberté ("Work is Freedom")(possibly a play on the infamous "Arbeit macht frei").

Dutronc's self-titled debut album, released at the end of 1966, sold over a million copies and was awarded a special Grand Prix du Disque by the Académie Charles Cros, in memoriam of one of its founders.

During that period, he released seven hit albums and more than 20 singles, including two further number ones: "J'aime les filles" in 1967 and "Il est cinq heures, Paris s'éveille" in 1968.

[10] During the recording of the 1980 album Guerre et pets ("War and Farts" – a play on the title of Tolstoy's novel), Wolfsohn proposed that Dutronc write with both Jacques Lanzmann and Serge Gainsbourg.

[13] Lanzmann has also worked on songs for a number of other artists, including Johnny Hallyday, Françoise Hardy and Petula Clark.