Should You Be Able to Disinherit Your Child?

This is the question at the heart of a case over the French celebrity Johnny Hallyday’s millions.

By Pamela Druckerman Contributing Opinion Writer

• May 28, 2019

Johnny Hallyday’s wife and children beside his coffin in Paris in 2017. From left, Jade, Laeticia, Joy, Laura Smet and David.CreditCreditLudovic Marin/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

PARIS — At lunchtime in France on Tuesday, all eyes were on a regional court near Paris that was set to rule on Johnny Hallyday, the iconic rock ’n’ roll singer who died in 2017.

The court was merely announcing whether it had jurisdiction over Mr. Hallyday’s estate or whether the case should be heard in California, where Mr. Hallyday lived during many of his final years. But at stake was a question that divides French and American law: Should you be allowed to disinherit your own kids?

In most of the United States, you can. Mr. Hallyday opted for the American approach: His Californian will names his fourth wife and widow, Laeticia Hallyday, as his sole heir. The couple’s two adopted daughters would presumably share in the bounty, which is estimated in the tens of millions, plus future royalties. But Mr. Hallyday’s two older children, from previous wives, would inherit nothing.

Under French law, such an arrangement is impossible. A large part of a parent’s estate — starting at 50 percent if there’s one child and reaching 75 percent for three or more — must be divided equally among the children. This includes “illegitimate” heirs and those from prior marriages, known collectively as “children from another bed.” (Louisiana, part of a former French colony, has a similar rule known as “forced heirship.”)

Mr. Hallyday’s older children want French law to prevail. They filed a court case to claim jurisdiction in Nanterre, near where their father died. Technically, they had to prove that the singer’s principal residence was in France. But the case became a referendum on Johnny Hallyday’s essence: Was he more American or more French?

The American argument has some validity. Mr. Hallyday — born Jean-Philippe Smet in Paris during World War II — took the stage name Johnny Hallyday as a teenager, after an American performer who acted as his surrogate father.

Johnny Hallyday backstage in 1960.CreditHarry Hammond/V&A Images, via Getty Images

Mr. Hallyday popularized rock ’n’ roll in France in the 1960s and quickly rose to fame as the “French Elvis.” That glitzy image morphed into one based on a kind of gritty Americana — an imagined country of cigarettes, motorcycles and hard luck. In the video for his 1980s hit “Quelque chose de Tennessee,” Mr. Hallyday plays a truck driver who has been felled by life.

“His artistic approach is very quickly associated with the United States,” a lawyer for Laeticia Hallyday argued in court. “He has always drawn his inspiration from there.”

He found his last wife there, too. On a trip to Miami in 1995 he met the French- born Laeticia, a 20-year-old recovering anorexic and model; he was a 50- something icon. (“I remember formulating it clearly in my head: ‘I will build my life with this girl,’” his autobiography says.) Their love story unfolded in the French media, with the public eventually approving of the fact that “she gave stability to Johnny, a family, the head of a tribe,” explained Laurence Pieau, a co- author of a biography of Laeticia published last year. In court, Laeticia’s lawyer said that she and Mr. Hallyday moved to Los Angeles in 2007, built a house and eventually enrolled their daughters in a local school. Mr. Hallyday had a green card and planned to apply for American citizenship, the lawyer said.

But there’s a French argument, too. The reason Mr. Hallyday could live relatively undisturbed in Los Angeles was that few people there had heard of him. Over a nearly 60-year career, practically all of his millions of album and ticket sales were in France.

For the French, he wasn’t just a singer; he was a cultural institution, with generations of fans. Even Laeticia Hallyday told a French newsmagazine last year that she had “married France, the Eiffel Tower.” His various marriages and the births and adoptions of his children were national events. So was his funeral: When he died of lung cancer at age 74, hundreds of thousands of mourners filled the Paris streets and President Emmanuel Macron eulogized him as “a part of France.”

Now Mr. Hallyday has prompted a new debate about disinheriting children. The French idea of forcibly breaking up estates originated after the French Revolution, among reformers who wanted to weaken the aristocracy and make sure that no single heir became too rich. That principle is now taken so much for granted that many French people were shocked to learn that Americans can simply cut some children off.

“We found this very violent, as if their very existence was being denied,” explained Ms. Pieau, who’s also editor of the French celebrity magazine Closer. The rock star Eddy Mitchell, Mr. Hallyday’s longtime friend, said, “In the U.S., you have the right to disinherit your children in favor of your cat or your dog, but we are not Americans.”

Laura Smet, Mr. Hallyday’s eldest daughter, wrote a wounded public letter to her dead father. Her lawyer pointed out that under the American will, she would have “not a guitar, not a motorcycle, and not even the signed cover of the song ‘Laura’ which is dedicated to her.” The French public blamed Laeticia — and Johnny — for the mess.

Yet they were also intrigued. Notaries reported an uptick in clients asking how to disinherit a child or wondering whether they’re at risk of being cut off themselves. A notary association hosted a debate on disinheritance, in which speakers remarked that leaving kids too much money can stunt their ambition, but leaving them all the same amount at least prevents squabbling and jealousy. Another wondered why parents must leave assets to a child who doesn’t love them or who “has given them all the misery in the world.” As if to weigh in on the nationality debate from above, last October, a posthumous Johnny Hallyday album titled “My Country Is Love” was released. It has sold more than 1.5 million copies.

Some of the proceeds might be divided up among Mr. Hallyday’s kids. Tuesday afternoon, the court in Nanterre ruled that it does have jurisdiction over the Hallyday estate, so it should be subject to French inheritance law. Laeticia’s camp vowed to appeal. For the moment, however, it appears that Johnny Hallyday was French after all.