THREE PRESIDENTS AND A FUNERAL

FRANCE MOURNS ROCK ICON

SAYONARA JOHNNY: From left, French actress Julie Gayet, former French president Francois Hollande, Carla Bruni, former French president Nicolas Sarkozy, an unidentified official, French Senate president Gerard Larcher, French prime minister Edouard Philippe, Brigitte Macron and French president Emmanuel Macron sit during the funeral ceremony for late French singer Johnny Hallyday yesterday at the Eglise de la Madeleine in Paris.

France bids farewell to its biggest rock star, honouring Johnny Hallyday with an exceptional funeral procession down the Champs-Elysees, a presidential speech and a parade of motorcyclists — all under intense security.

Few figures in French history have earned a send-off as elaborate as the one for the man sometimes dubbed the French Elvis.

It was ordered by President Emmanuel Macron — a Hallyday fan himself, like generations of others across the French-speaking world. ‘‘Johnny was yours. Johnny was his public. Johnny was his country,” Macron told fans massed in Paris.

Hallyday’s death last Wednesday at age 74, after fighting lung cancer, unleashed emotion across the country, where the man known to the public simply as ‘Johnny’ had been an icon for more than half a century.

“He should have fallen 100 times but what held him up and lifted him was your fervour, the love that you brought him,” Macron told Hallyday fans on the steps of the church, referring to the musician’s illnesses and extreme lifestyle.

Shouts of “Johnny! Johnny!” and thunderous applause rose up as Macron finished his speech. Fans then broke out in the singing of Hallyday tunes.

In an honour usually reserved for heads of state or cultural greats like 19th-century writer Victor Hugo, Hallyday’s funeral cortege rode past Napoleon’s Arc de Triomphe monument and down the Champs-Elysees Avenue to the Place de la Concorde plaza on the Seine River.