Prime Minister Gabriel Attal arrives on the “anti-Instagram” French social network BeReal

Nourish his image as a young prime minister, and at the same time show his support for the French “start-up nation”: Gabriel Attal announced Tuesday, on his Instagram and TikTok accounts, his arrival on the fashionable French social network BeReal. “Hello BeReal!”, simply wrote the youngest tenant of Matignon in the Fifth Republic (34 years old), in the caption of his first publication on BeReal. Posts that are recognizable at a glance: they are made up of two photos, one taken with the front camera of your smartphone, the other with the rear camera.

Gabriel Attal's first BeReal shows him in his office at the Hôtel de Matignon: a selfie photo, in his shirt sleeves, and a photo of his desk on which several sheets of paper and other files are placed. On Instagram, the publication has already reached 34,000 likes, and exceeded 200,000 on TikTok.

Created in 2020 by two French people, Alexis Barreyat and Kévin Perreau, BeReal (“be authentic” in French) goes against the grain of traditional TikTok or Instagram, playing the “no filter” card to the fullest. Because the principle of this social network is based on spontaneity: once a day, at a different time, users receive a notification, which invites them to send a photo of the present moment, taken with the front and rear cameras of the smartphone .

Also read BeReal, the French application copied by Instagram and Snap

And it works, especially among 18-24 year olds. In the United States, its largest market, 13% of adolescents use the app. It also appealed to young French people, since the number of unique monthly visitors in France increased from 2.8 million to 4.6 million in one year, according to Médiamétrie data.

However, BeReal's growth has slowed in recent months. To find a second wind, the French social network announced Tuesday in our columns that it was opening up to celebrities and brands. First to launch on BeReal, the PSG football club, the Boston RedSox baseball team, the singers Niall Horan, Joe Jonas and Dixie D'Amelio, the cosmetics brands Glossier and MAC Cosmetics, the equipment manufacturers Adidas and Puma or even PlayStation video games.

It is therefore thanks to this new functionality of the app that Gabriel Attal, as a public figure, was able to join the social network. However, this Wednesday morning, the Prime Minister's profile was nowhere to be found. “BeReal tells me that there have been too many attempts at the same time to subscribe, that their servers are saturated and that in fact my account is either invisible or inaccessible,” explained the person concerned on Instagram in response to a subscriber who was worried about not finding the Prime Minister's account on BeReal.