“He was beaten up in front of my eyes”: this heavy trauma experienced by the daughter of Alain Barrière during a robbery

Guénaëlle Barrière will never be able to forget her father, Alain. Since her childhood, and until the death of the singer in 2019, she was his shoulder, his confidence, his friend… Together, they shared everything. Until a trauma from which she still suffers today, as she confided with tears in her eyes on the set of It starts today this Wednesday, September 7. “We were robbed when I must have been 11 or 12 years old in our house, at home”, confided the daughter of Alain Barrière. And to remember the long time spent by the thugs at home: “He was beaten up in front of my eyes for 45 minutes, which is a very long time. That day, I was so, so, so scared”. Years later, Guénaëlle Barrière still does not really know why these people attacked her dad. “It was a bit dark as a thing but he was very damaged physically, she told France 2. He had a year of recovery behind.”

“You have the impression that you will overcome the thing, and not at all”, added the daughter of Alain Barrière. This traumatic episode triggered something in her. “After that, I always felt responsible for him. That’s one of the reasons why I stayed quite closeshe continued on the set of It starts today. He was someone who constantly put himself in danger.” The relationship between Alain Barrière and his daughter has been full of ups and downs. “We did a lot of things together. We argued a lot and we reconciled a lot. It worked, we managed to carry out projects, to work together, remembered Guénaëlle Barrière. But it’s difficult to live with an artist because he lives in a permanent dramatic whirlwind. It’s going well, it’s going badly, it’s going very well, it’s going very badly… My father had a tendency to argue with everyone, to generate a lot of problems.”

Alain Barrière needed “this state to live”

“Me, I tried to settle them all and I said to myself: ‘after that it will be better’, but in fact not. When you want to make them happy in spite of themselves, when you try to bring them back to a kind of balance, in a normal life, you do violence to them. They need this state to live, to seek emotions, to write”, analyzed the daughter of the singer. After a turbulent life, Alain Barrière died on December 18, 2019 at the age of 84, a few days after the death of his wife, Agnès Cohen-Solal. “She was a very fragile and very complicated personality. He was extremely faithful. When you live with artists, it’s their works that come first and if you’re a little sensitive it can be complicated to live togetherconfided their daughter after their disappearance. At the end they were both sick, mum couldn’t stand my dad seeing her suffer and vice versa. Several songs have been written about their disappearance.”