Never stingy with details about his private life, Michel Fugain made a strange confession about his parents. In fact, they designed it within the walls of a prison!
Michel Fugain, who we find this January 3 in the show The secret box with Faustine Bollaert and on January 5 in A Sunday in the countryside with Frédéric Lopez, was born in the heart of the Second World War, in May 1942. At the time, his father, Pierre Fugain, was a communist resistance fighter and was imprisoned at Fort Barraux. It was thanks to his son that he was able to escape.
Michel Fugain was “conceived in prison”!
From his father who died in 2009, the interpreter of Do like the bird will, in part, remember his immense commitment. During the Second World War, he was imprisoned in Isère by the Pétainist police for joining the resistance. At the time, he was a medical student and had therefore been appointed head of the infirmary by his jailers.
And it is thanks to this special access that Michel Fugain was able to be conceived by his parents! “This allowed my mother to come see my father and ultimately conceive me“, he told the microphone of Europe 1. before letting go: “So I was conceived in prison, hence my propensity to sing about freedom perhaps“.
Michel Fugain: why his father was able to escape from prison thanks to him
And it was thanks to the birth of Michel Fugain that his resistance father was able to escape from prison. Having obtained permission to see his son, Pierre Fugain took advantage of this renewed freedom to attract the sympathy of the chief of staff of the prefect of Grenoble, Louis Amade, by complimenting him on his poems, and thus obtain his complete release. He then worked as a doctor and treated some people for free after the war.
Growing up, the future singer rubbed shoulders with many cultural and political figures. According to his confidences on TV5 Monde, his father even knew the famous artist Pablo Picasso. “I wasn’t affected as a kid, but I was immersed in a permanent excitement, an incredible energy. It rubbed off on me“, he said in his book En confidenceco-written with journalist Véronique Aïache. His father, Pierre Fugain, died in 2009 at the age of 90, but had obtained honors, notably in Grenoble, where a square now bears his name.
