It's true, they are nice, all these little villages
All these towns, hamlets, localities, cities
With their castles, their churches, their beaches
They have only one weak point : they are inhabited

They are inhabited by those people who look at
All the rest with contempt, from up their city walls
The race of the bigots, the flag-wavers
The happy imbeciles who were born somewhere
The happy imbeciles who were born somewhere

Damn these sons of their motherlands
Impaled forever up their bell towers
Who show you their towers, their museum, their city halls
Show you their birthplace until they squint

Whether they popped out of Paris, of Rome or of Sète
Or the end of the world, or of Zanzibar
Or even of my ass, they're proud of it, my goodness
The happy imbeciles who were born somewhere
The happy imbeciles who were born somewhere

The sand in which their fragile ostritches
Bury their head, is the softest ever
And as for the air their use to inflate their balloons
Their soap bubbles, it is divine breath

And step by step, here they are, getting worked up
To the point of thinking that the dung produced by
Their horses, even wooden ones, makes everybody else jealous
The happy imbeciles who were born somewhere
The happy imbeciles who were born somewhere

It is not a common place, the one of their birth,
They feel heartfully sorry for those poor unfortunates
Those little clumsy ones who didn't have the presence
The presence of mind to come to existence at their place

When the bell toll over their precarious bliss
Against strangers all more or less barbaric
They pop out of their hole to die at war
The happy imbeciles who were born somewhere
The happy imbeciles who were born somewhere

My God how sweet it would be on the Earth of Men
If we weren't to encounter this incongruous race
This tedious race, which everywhere abounds
The race of people-of-the-land, of local-folks

How beautiful life would be, in all circumstances
If You hadn't pulled out of oblivion all these dimwits
Proofs, quite possibly, of your non-existence :
The happy imbeciles who were born somewhere
The happy imbeciles who were born somewhere