Gabriel Attal, 34, the new prime minister of France appointed by President Emmanuel Macron, has attracted attention for his age (he is the youngest in the role to date) and his sexual orientation (he is gay). Another factoid has made news as well: his Tunisian and Alsatian Jewish father, Yves Attal, who died in 2015.
According to The Guardian, Attal said in 2019: “My father said to me, ‘Perhaps you’re Orthodox but you’ll feel Jewish all your life, mainly because you’ll suffer antisemitism because of your name.’” He reported experiencing bullying in school.
Yves Attal worked as a lawyer and film producer. His wife, Marie de Couriss, of French and Greek-Russian Orthodox Christian ancestry, worked as an employee of a film production company. Their children (Gabriel Attal has three sisters) were raised as Orthodox Christians.
Gabriel Attal said that he became interested in politics in 2002 after attending a rally featuring far-right Holocaust denier Jean-Marie Le Pen, then a challenger to French President Jacques Chirac.
While Gabriel Attal’s politics began as Socialist in his youth, he is now characterized as center-right. He is known to have admonished students protesting changes in France’s education system as “selfish bobos,” a term meaning “bourgeois Bohemians.”
He began his new political position on Jan. 9.