Gabriel Attal, France’s youngest prime minister and first openly gay leader of the government, has risen to the top of government in record time. Attal, famous for his ability to think on his feet, is reportedly the people’s most popular politician. He previously held the position of education minister.
Gabriel Attal was raised by a half-French father and an Orthodox Christian mother
Gabriel Attal was born in 1989 to Yves Attal and Marie de Couriss in Paris, France. His father was of Tunisian-Jewish ethnicity, and his mother descended from Orthodox Christians from Odesa, Ukraine. Attal and his three younger sisters enjoyed a privileged Parisian upbringing.
He revealed in an interview on TF1 that he was seven when Yves and Marie divorced. “I went through difficult times like many families go through. My parents divorced, separated when I was 7 years old. And it was a difficult divorce. But, I was lucky to have a loving family around me and to never lack for anything.”
Yves Attal, a film producer and lawyer, died in 2015. Attal told the Liberation news outlet that his father warned him that he would always suffer antisemitism: “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’.”