Françoise Madeleine Hardy was born on 17 January 1944 at the Marie-Louise Clinic in the 9th arrondissement of Paris, in Nazi-occupied France during World War II. At the time of her birth, there was an air raid alert in place, with the windows of the clinic "exploding". She has related being born during this violent context with the "abnormally anxious temperament" that she developed as an adult. Her mother Madeleine Hardy, who came from an ordinary background, raised Françoise and her younger sister Michèle—born eighteen months after her—as a single parent. Her father Étienne Dillard—a married man who came from a much wealthier family—did little to help them financially and was largely an absent figure in their upbringing, only visiting the children a couple of times a year. Madeleine Hardy raised her daughters strictly, in a modest apartment on the 9th arrondissement's Rue d'Aumale street. Hardy had an unhappy and troubled childhood, and mainly engaged in solitary activities like reading, playing with dolls or listening to the radio. At the insistence of their father, the girls went to a Catholic school called Institution La Bruyère, under the tutelage of Trinitarian nuns. The gap of social origin between Hardy and her classmates was a source of permanent humiliation for her. She recalled in her autobiography: "This is most likely where the feeling of shame that has tormented me non-stop since I was a child took root. Everything fell into place: the social status of my parents who I naively believed were divorced, (...) the good sisters' constant complaints that my father was generally a year behind in his payments, and the various differences with the other girls." Her lifelong insecurities were also fuelled by her regular visits to her maternal grandmother in Aulnay-sous-Bois, who "told [her] repeatedly that [she] was unattractive and a very bad person". Between 1952 and 1960, Hardy and her sister were sent every summer to Austria to learn German, encouraged by her mother's new lover, an Austrian baron. As her father played piano, Hardy was encouraged to receive piano lessons as a very young child, from which she quickly dropped out after experiencing stage fright when she was supposed to display her talents onstage at the Salle Gaveau. A disciplined student, Hardy skipped two years of secondary education and passed her baccalauréat in 1960 at age sixteen. To mark the occasion, her father asked her what gift