Washington politics have long been compared to high school, but they’ve got nothing on France right now.
This is not a reference to the tender age, just 34, of France’s youngest-ever prime minister, Gabriel Attal, appointed just after the new year. It’s more literal than that. Among the haters that Attal’s shock appointment brought out, inside and out of President Emmanuel Macron’s camp, none is more voluble, nor more personally dedicated, nor more relentless, than the “anti-system” lawyer and pamphleteer Juan Branco. He also happens to have been Attal’s private-school classmate.
Attal is part of a small, hyper-educated, often arrogant elite of French public servants that still governs France today. But Branco’s enmity started back when they were both skinny-shouldered teens at the posh Sixth Arrondissement École Alsacienne, and it hasn’t cooled down since. If this is what it’s going to be like when the rest of the millennials get their shot at national politics, French people should start looking into silent retreats now.
Branco’s alleged cyberbullying started on a community blog he created while at Alsacienne as a young teenager. Since then, his greatest hits have included outing Attal as gay on X (the platform formerly known as Twitter) in 2018 and in a bombastic, anti-Macron tract from the same year, Crépuscule. (Branco declined to respond to any of Air Mail’s questions and requests for clarification, which he referred to as “unsubstantiated libelous enunciations.”)
In the book, he spent pages dissecting how what he called Attal’s snobbism and opportunism made him the perfect avatar for his mentor, Macron. He accused the admittedly young and ambitious politician, then still brand-new in government with not much of a profile, of sleeping his way into power. Branco claimed that Attal was romantically linked to the leader of Macron’s La République En Marche! party, Stéphane Séjourné. (The two ended up as domestic partners, though they split two years ago. Obviously it was amicable; Attal just named Séjourné to the post of foreign minister.)
Crépuscule was panned by journalists whose own persistent work uncovering corruption in French politics made many of Branco’s actually provable accusations old news. Loaded with warmed-over gossip, it was explosive only for readers who weren’t yet aware that politicians, media barons, and captains of industry often peddle their influence to make common cause. You don’t say.
Still, it became a best-seller. Since then, thanks to other attention-getting work such as representing the gilet jaunes, complete with frontline photos, and subsequent books with names such as Coup d’État and Destroy the Enemy, Branco’s star has risen on YouTube and X, where his output under the handle @anatolium has earned millions of views. Snickering, Paris Match dubbed him “the dark angel of Saint-Germain-des-Prés.”
If this is what it’s going to be like when the rest of the millennials get their shot at national politics, French people should start looking into silent retreats now.
Despite his avenging self-presentation, the only political head Branco ever helped claim was that of Benjamin Griveaux, the Macron protégé who ran for Paris mayor in 2020 before leaked sex tapes derailed his campaign. Branco was the lawyer of the principal leaker, Pyotr Pavlensky, and, one TV interviewer suggested, his puppeteer.
It would all be less ridiculous if Branco’s and Attal’s young lives weren’t practically identical. Branco is the privileged son of the swashbuckling art-house producer Paulo Branco and a graduate of Sciences Po and the Sorbonne. While attending Sciences Po, Attal, also the son of a film producer, also went to law school at Assas. They both took posts with powerful ministers, Branco setting up a youth think tank for President Jacques Chirac’s former prime minister Dominique de Villepin, then changing sides to advise President François Hollande’s Socialist minister of culture Aurélie Filippetti.
Attal worked for Hollande’s health minister, Marisol Touraine, before defecting to Macron’s cause the minute he declared his run in 2016. Attal ran for office in the suburb of Vanves and won. Branco had stood for a local election as a member of the Green Party and lost.
What caused the promising young Branco’s divergence from his Establishment destiny? He blames Macron’s crew for their uniquely egregious corruption, perhaps forgetting about myriad scandals under Hollande, Nicolas Sarkozy, and Chirac, to name just three. Could it have been sour grapes? Aurélie Filippetti told FranceInfo that Branco “took umbrage” when she didn’t promote him to head adviser, even though she told him there was no such position for a deputy.
After leaving his post, Branco went to work for Julian Assange, trying and failing to get him asylum in France, and ran unsuccessfully for a seat in France’s lower house on the left-populist France Insoumise ticket.
In the meantime, he wrote for organs such as Le Monde Diplomatique and had a blog hosted by Médiapart. He started crying censorship when an exposé he’d pitched to Le Monde was assigned and then killed. His editor was said to have found the reporting thin for all the verbiage. Read a few paragraphs of Crépuscule and you’ll sympathize.
Branco most recently got into hot water this summer over a big to-do in Senegal regarding his client, the populist opposition politician Ousmane Sonko. In early August, after he leveled accusations against the Senegalese government, and the French Foreign Ministry leveled accusations against him, Branco was arrested in Dakar for the dissemination of fake news. After two days in jail, on a hunger strike, he was sent back to France. (Sonko, who campaigned on an anti-corruption platform that includes cracking down on L.G.B.T.Q.I.A.+ rights, has since been struck from the ballot.)
Meanwhile, even as the overprepared, front-row kid nonpareil, Attal had experienced an upward glide so steep and smooth that he seemed to feel no need to respond until this November, when he finally parried back. Perhaps sensing an opportunity as the newly named minister of education, as part of an anti-bullying campaign he had just launched, he gave a moving confessional on prime-time TV about being tortured for years by an unnamed “fellow student.”
Proving his reputation as a formidable communicator, Attal revealed a heretofore unseen vulnerability, going into emotional detail about the homophobic slurs, how this kid would post derogatory comments under Attal’s name on his high-school blog, how he couldn’t tell his parents because he was in the closet, and how it caused problems with his father, practically up until the day he died of cancer.
When asked if he had considered lodging a formal complaint against Crépuscule, which also wasn’t named but was alluded to, Attal delivered the coup de grâce: “I didn’t register a formal complaint because I said to myself, he was in a permanent search for some kind of link to me.” Ouch.
Branco returned fire immediately. Benefiting richly from X’s relatively new lack of character limits, he hit the platform the same night, accusing the minister of having faked his education credentials. He also stated, among other insults, with no proof or confirmation, that Attal is now in a relationship with the outgoing minister of health, Olivier Véran. (Véran has made no declarations, and his most recent public relationship was with a woman. Also, Attal just pushed him out of his new Cabinet. So a romantic relationship would be awkward if not impossible.)
Attal’s interview was so sensational and Branco’s letter was so teeth-gnashingly over the top—he wrote in reference to Attal’s TV hit, “Listening to the descriptions of this hollow and greedy life, I understood the reason for his ever-paler face and darkening undereye circles”—that the national daily Libération sent a reporter to interview the two’s Alsacienne classmates to see just what had gone down over there. Yes, this is what it’s come to.
What Libération found wasn’t cute. Branco’s blogs were “a hive of misogynist insults,” one woman classmate recalled. “I liked Attal OK, though he was a little snippy, not that nice. The stuff about classism, that could totally be him. He had that side. [Branco] I saw as this loner, really misogynist, with a really strange relationship to girls.” She continued, “There was a lot of homophobia. [Branco] created something uncontrollable and super-violent for everyone who found themselves on that blog.”
While Branco has posted new X screeds every couple of days since Attal was named prime minister, Attal hasn’t made a peep in Branco’s direction since November. He probably doesn’t have time. Unlike some people, he has a country to run. XOXO.
Alexandra Marshall is a Writer at Large at AIR MAIL and a contributor to W, The Wall Street Journal, Vogue, and Travel + Leisure. She chronicles her recent relocation to Le Perche in the newsletter An American Who Fled Paris
