I mentioned Jaques Brel earlier and just did a little more research on him. On Wiki it says "He is considered a master of the modern chanson". I then went off to learn more about the chanson and found the following. "A chanson (French pronunciation: ?[??~s?~], "song", from Latin cantio, gen. cantionis) is in general any lyric-driven French song, usually polyphonic and secular."

From the same article, "The earliest chansons were the epic poems performed to simple monophonic melodies by a professional class of jongleurs or ménestrels. These usually recounted the famous deeds (geste) of past heroes, legendary and semi-historical. The Song of Roland is the most famous of these, but in general the chansons de geste are studied as literature since very little of their music survives." I

So, is a chanson also a ballad and is, as I suspect, Jaques Brel a modern Ballad singer?