Felix Bovie first made a career as a landscape painter. Later on however, he completely devoted himself to the writing of poetic texts for songs he interpreted himself as a mid-19th-century singer songwriter. A scion of a wealthy family living in the Belgian capital, he frequented bourgeois associations such as the Masonic lodges but he was also an adept of more bohemian, frolicsome societies who liked to mock Freemasonry as such. The song text production of Bovie, which has often been compared to the one of French liberal singer Béranger, can only be understood in the interface of all those specific spheres. There, artistic and more saucy motives went along definitely anticlerical and particular Masonic themes. Bovie had been accepted by the Amis Philanthropes lodge but eventually left for another Brussels lodge that rejected the politically militant kind of Freemasonry the former advocated. The songs Bovie wrote and performed celebrated a spiritualist and convivial Freemasonry, that surely was apolitical but nevertheless proved frankly anticlerical, if only as a reaction against the Belgian episcopal condemnation of Freemasonry of 1837. ; Félix Bovie fit carrière comme peintre paysagiste avant de se consacrer entièrement à l’écriture de poèmes qui servaient aux chansons interprétées par lui-même. Issu d’un milieu aisé de la capitale belge, il fréquentait des associations bourgeoises comme les loges maçonniques mais aussi des sociabilités badines plus bohémiennes où l’on se moquait de cette même franc-maçonnerie. La production en textes de chansons de Bovie, souvent comparée à celle du chansonnier libéral français Béranger, doit se comprendre dans l’interface de ces sphères, où des thèmes artistiques et grivoises côtoyaient des motifs anticléricaux et des contenus maçonniques bien particuliers. Initié à la loge des Amis Philanthropes, Bovie finit par quitter cet atelier bruxellois pour un autre qui se refusait à politiser la franc-maçonnerie comme le fit le premier. Les chansons maçonniques de Bovie fêtaient ...