On 18 June 1940, Charles de Gaulle, then a little-known junior army officer, sat in a BBC studio in London and made his famous rallying call for the French to resist the Nazi occupation and its puppet Vichy government.
In the eyes of the British prime minister Winston Churchill, De Gaulle was an arrogant, stubborn and defiant thorn in his and the allies’ side, but the Frenchman never stopped believing in the greatness of France and the need for resistance.
Now a new two-part biopic, based on a biography of De Gaulle by a British author, has proved to be a surprise summer hit in French cinemas and given the country’s young a new old hero.
La Bataille de Gaulle, to be released in UK cinemas on 28 August and 19 September, has drawn an audience of 5 million people since its release in June, rivalling Hollywood blockbusters Spider-Man: Brand New Day and The Odyssey. And not just because cinemas have been air-conditioned refuges from the successive heatwaves.
The French historian Alya Aglan, a professor at the Panthéon-Sorbonne university in Paris, and co-author of the bestselling book De Gaulle, France and the World, said: “In the history of France, we have always had a ‘providential man’, someone who arrived at the right time and turns a situation of weakness into a position of strength.
“The enthusiasm for the film among young people is because they are discovering parts of a story they did not know: a man who knew failures, hesitation, hard knocks and who embodied the spirit of resistance because he remained himself against everything even at the cost of being occasionally ridiculous.
“There is emotion, there is information they didn’t know and it resonates with today’s young particularly in the run-up to a presidential election in which we will find ourselves in a very divisive situation.”
The films, both nearly three hours long and costing up to £80m to make, are adapted from the 2018 De Gaulle biography A Certain Idea of France: The Life of Charles de Gaulle by Julian Jackson, a professor of history at Queen Mary University of London.
The first installment, L’Âge de fer (Iron Age), follows De Gaulle’s journey to London in June 1940 and the founding of the Free French forces to combat the Nazis, highlighting the Battle of Bir Hakeim in which 3,700 Free French soldiers held out in the Libyan desert against 37,000 Nazi troops led by Erwin Rommel for 16 days, allowing Britain’s Eighth Army to retreat. The second, J’écris ton nom (I Write Your Name) covers the rest of the war up to the liberation of France in 1944.
Directed by Antonin Baudry, a French diplomat and former ministerial adviser, the cast includes Simon Abkarian, who played a James Bond villain, Alex Dimitrios, in Casino Royale, as General de Gaulle and the award winning British Shakespearean actor Simon Russell Beale as Winston Churchill.
Baudry told French radio that he wanted the films to “speak to young people … and the themes of war, resistance and engagement”.
After the first release, the biopic appeared to be a flop; but to appeal to a younger audience, the film company Pathé organised watch parties hosted by the YouTube and Instagram influencer Inoxtag for young guests to meet Baudry. Local councils also offered free tickets for students and the word spread.
Outside one central Paris cinema last week, business student Alex and friends said they had enjoyed the film. “We heard about it on social media and decided to see what it was all about,” he said. “We’re taught about the Free French and De Gaulle in school, but there were a lot of things I didn’t know. It was interesting to see how Paris students heeded De Gaulle’s call to resist.”
The historian Henry Rousso, a second world war specialist, said: “There are very few films in French cinema that can be called an historical ‘epic’ and this is one of them. The director has succeeded perhaps because it is one of French history’s greatest epics.
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“De Gaulle was an exceptional character in his lifetime and he remains one for the French today when there is no equivalent political figure.”
Not everyone is as enthusiastic. Arnaud Teyssier, a historian and De Gaulle biographer, dismissed the biopic as a “comic strip” that did not do its subject justice.
“The film is not without great appeal: it had a big budget, good distribution and is based on a rightly respected biography. But the disappointment is equally great,” he wrote in Le Point magazine.
“De Gaulle … with his elusive demeanour, is far more complex to portray than Churchill, for whom one need only cast a portly actor who cracks one good joke after another while always puffing on a cigar,” Teyssier wrote.
Nathalie Cieutat, the deputy director general of distribution at Pathé Films, said the company’s research had showed “it is the theme of resistance that has made the film particularly popular to the young”.
As France approaches what promises to be a bitter presidential election next year, which current polls suggest could result in a battle between the far-right National Rally and far-left France Unbowed, Aglan said the character of De Gaulle had a particularly modern resonance.
“When French people are divided and faced with the extreme right and extreme left and wondering who to vote for when they don’t want either, they would like to have the choice of a providential man or woman who can save us from such terrible choices,” she said.
“De Gaulle gives hope because he resisted and right now everyone is thinking about how to resist.”
