Les Oubliés Lyrics in English Gauvain Sers

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Below, I translated the lyrics of the song Les Oubliés by Gauvain Sers from French to English.

In front of the green gate of his primary school

You spot him right away

Always the same look with his wool sweater

You know he's a teacher

He's crying over the closure coming next term

Of his last two classes

They say the reason's a lack of numbers

But we know what's really going on

We're the forgotten ones

The countryside, the drifters

The ones too far from Paris

The least of their worries

Wanting to lump the neighboring cantons together, 30 kids per room

That same philosophy that turns the country into a shopping mall

It wasn't enough that we've lost the grocery store

That the doctors took off

There's nobody left in town

Just banks gleaming on Main Street

We're the forgotten ones

The countryside, the drifters

The ones too far from Paris

The least of their worries

How sad the village is with all those roundabouts

That make heads spin

How sad the playground is without kids screaming

Balls at the windows

Even the little baker wonders what she'll do

With her sticky candies

Even the neighbor across the street is scared, it freaks her out

This silence in the school

We're the forgotten ones

The countryside, the drifters

The ones too far from Paris

The least of their worries

When in the upper spheres, ministry hallways

Students are just numbers

There are people on the ground, chalk all over their hands

Who get treated like underlings

Those suit-and-tie guys who shut the schools

Are very often the ones

Who'll never look, not from far or near

A child in the eyes

We're the forgotten ones

The countryside, the drifters

The ones too far from Paris

The least of their worries

We're third-string

Last slice of the cake

The countryside, the drifters

We're the forgotten ones

In front of the green gate of his primary school

There's the village teacher

A whole life of kids

Building them a tomorrow

He has to turn the page

We're the forgotten ones

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SONG MEANING

Imagine a tiny French village where the schoolyard’s green gate squeaks open every morning and the same wool-sweatered teacher welcomes the kids. In Les Oubliés (The Forgotten Ones), Gauvain Sers turns this simple scene into a moving portrait of rural France that feels left behind. With warm folk-pop melodies, he sings about closing classrooms, disappearing bakeries, silent playgrounds, and towns slowly hollowed out as services and jobs migrate toward Paris.

Yet the song is more than nostalgia. It is a gentle but pointed protest: Sers contrasts the chalk-dust reality of village life with the ministry offices where children become statistics. He gives a voice to the “campagne, les paumés, les trop loin de Paris” – the people who feel like the last slice of the national cake. By the final chorus, you will hear both the sadness and the quiet resilience of communities determined not to vanish from the map.

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Gauvain Sers Les Oubliés Lyrics