French ex-PM Gabriel Attal visits Ukraine in search of his independence and his Odesa castles

It was the weekend after Gabriel Attal’s arrival at Matignon, the prime minister’s residence, on January 9. Having just been appointed head of government, 34-year-old Attal sent his foreign affairs minister, Stéphane Séjourné, to Kyiv. A meeting was arranged between Séjourné and President Volodymyr Zelensky, who asked, “Do the French know they have a Ukrainian prime minister?”

In his subsequent eight months as head of the French government, Attal never visited Ukraine, a sort of “reserved domain” implicitly kept for President Emmanuel Macron. But for his first trip since leaving office, it was this country, at the heart of the international news since Russia’s invasion, that he chose as his destination, as a token of his new-found freedom. While Foreign Affairs is still lacking a minister, Attal arrived in Kyiv on Friday, September 13, to meet Ukrainian Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal (and possibly Volodymyr Zelensky). Attal will speak at the Yes Forum, the annual diplomatic gathering of the Western world’s liberals. He is also due to make a more personal trip to the Black Sea on Saturday.

Like US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Attal is heir to a Ukrainian history that he wants to explore in Odesa alongside his mother, Marie (“Marika”) de Couriss, who is also curious to discover family properties abandoned during the Russian Revolution. Le Monde visited the site, thanks to the current owners of the family’s former properties and the Couriss’ Ukrainian biographer, who were overjoyed by this mini political-genealogical “happening” and the French politician’s return to his roots.

Gothic ribs and false minarets

First stop: A property in the village of Kurisove, 50 kilometers north of Odesa. Rakes were much in use in the driveways to clean up before the arrival of “France’s youngest prime minister,” as Attal is known here – although it’s not certain that everyone knows he’s resigned. Cleaning ladies from a nearby high school were requisitioned to wash the fresco of heroic Soviet workers at the entrance to the property, once confiscated by the Bolsheviks, like so many others belonging to the nobility. The incredible Château Couriss, built around 1820 at the request of one of Attal’s ancestors, blends all styles, from Gothic rib vaults to false minarets.

This ancestor of Greek origin was called Ivan Onufrievitch de Kourisse (1762-1836). He was “enrolled with the Cossacks who rallied to General Alexander Suvorov’s regular army of the Tsars to fight the Turks” between 1787 and 1792, explained our invaluable guide, Viktor Mikhalchenko, 67, a former engineer with a passion for local history. Decorated and ennobled after the battle of Izmail, a port on the Danube river, Ivan Onufrievitch de Kourisse was rewarded with wheat lands around Odesa and began by building a mansion there, transformed in 1892 into a castle by his grandson, Ivan Iraklievitch Kourisse. “He needed rooms and rooms for his collections of paintings, many of which are now in the Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg, and of old manuscripts” – Gogol, Pushkin, even Voltaire and Gilbert Romme, the French “mountain” mathematician who invented the republican calendar.

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