This film bursts onto a French political, economic, and cultural scene that has been steeped in Americanism, globalism, and Europeanism for half a century. Today’s France is the antithesis of Gaullism. It is fully integrated into the American imperial system and is at an advanced stage of fusion—possibly dissolution—within the supranational European Union and NATO, the military alliance led by the United States. President Macron places the European flag ahead of the French tricolour. De Gaulle would not have appreciated any of it. It is therefore remarkable to see the old general return to the forefront. The director, Antonin Baudry, was, among other things, an adviser to Dominique de Villepin, perhaps the last surviving Gaullist.
By Yakov Rabkin and Samir Saul, Professors of History, Université de Montréal
De Gaulle embodied French independence, and it was necessarily anti-American, since U.S. hegemony was the principal threat of the post-1945 era. The film shows that this threat began to loom during the war, especially toward its end, when France almost became an American protectorate. It highlights the stakes of France-US relations and the future the United States was preparing for a post-war France.
From this point of view, the film is a bolt from the blue against US-led globalism and the decline of today’s France. Even at the lowest point of its history, between 1940 and 1944, France’s best people resisted and at least saved its honour. The underlying theme of the film is the inspiration to be drawn from them. The heroism and idealism of a recent past stand in stark contrast to today’s vassalized France, which seems at a loss about its future.
This film is not a historical documentary; it is a feature film (a five-and-a-half-hour diptych) of popular history targeting the general public with a clear message presented with drama, music on an epic scale. It is an action movie, complete with battles, tanks, cannons, and shells. Political positions are expressed through short, pithy, and often famous quotes rather than speeches or explanations.
It is a propaganda film, which is not necessarily a bad thing. Propaganda films can be masterpieces. Some, like Eisenstein’s Alexander Nevsky, have become cinema classics—though this new French biopic is unlikely to join them. Pathé invested heavily in it, and the large cast is typical of such superproductions. Technically impeccable and visually impressive, the film nonetheless appears schematic, and its main protagonists, De Gaulle and Leclerc, look stilted. De Gaulle seems rigid—stiffer, in any case, than he was in reality—and his diction is a touch grandiloquent, as if he were speaking constantly for posterity. This contrasts with the nuanced and sophisticated tradition of French films about the Second World War, such as Section spéciale. The new film presents unidimensional, hardly believable heroes rather than living human beings.
The main message of the film, covering the period of 1940–44, is that stubborn resilience, consistent arrogance, and intrepid courage can redeem a country after a shameful defeat. In several scenes, De Gaulle plays cards, which is indeed an apt metaphor: his entire interaction with the vastly more powerful Roosevelt and Churchill is to keep a poker face when he has no good cards to play. What could a few thousand Free French do next to the tens of millions mobilized by the other actors in a titanic struggle?
The United States is cast as the main adversary. Roosevelt appears overbearing, calling De Gaulle’s bluff, but in the end relents in the face of the invariably pompous and inflexible general. De Gaulle safeguards the independence of his country against terrible odds. This is one of the political motifs of a film made in a country headed—much like its German and Canadian counterparts—by a former international banker who occasionally voices passionate pleas for “strategic autonomy.” Yet, on the military and strategic level, France, like the rest of the EU, fits neatly into the global policy of the United States, which subcontracts Europeans to manufacture munitions and military hardware while retaining control of space intelligence, AI, and other cutting-edge technologies.
By accident or design, the film fails to show the war’s global character, which underpinned De Gaulle’s entire strategy from 1940 onward. The principal front of the Second World War was in the East, where more than 80% of German forces were engaged against the Soviet Army. Yet, the USSR is practically absent from the film. However important the Battle of Bir Hakeim was, the fact remains that the battles of Moscow, Stalingrad, and Kursk were of an altogether different scale and import. The real De Gaulle never underrated the USSR (“Eternal Russia” as he called it), traveling there in December 1944 in search of support and returning for a triumphant state visit in 1966, which took him across the country all the way to the Soviet space centre Baikonur – the first Western leader authorised to see it.
One might also see the film as part of broader efforts to prepare the French public for a war with Russia—a prospect that has been consistently drummed into the minds of Europeans for months. But De Gaulle hardly fits this narrative because he was not anti-Russian. On the contrary, he was a partisan of the original Franco-Russian alliance against Germany and of the “beautiful and good alliance” of 1944 as a guarantee of France’s independence and future. A war against Russia would be antithetical to De Gaulle’s vision of a Europe stretching “from the Atlantic to the Urals,” though perhaps few cinemagoers remember that today. What the film attempts to inspire is the determination to fight in the most desperate circumstances. It remains to be seen whether this message impresses the young French generation that would be sacrificed if ever such a war materialized. German youth are beginning to resist militarization, and the current student revolts give little reason to believe that French youth would be any more pliant.
In the aftermath of the war, two-thirds of the French people considered the Soviet Union the principal factor in the victory over Nazi Germany. The French Resistance was also largely communist. These facts are eloquently absent from the film. The movie does not peddle outright lies, but it carefully avoids any discussion of the Soviet Union and the communists because many associate them with today’s Russia. This dovetails with the current European narrative that turns Putin into a modern Hitler—the implacable enemy responsible for all European ills. When Ursula von der Leyen accuses Russia of cutting energy supplies to Europe, “forgetting” the harm that Europe inflicted on itself through its own economic sanctions, this brazen lie is never flagged in the mainstream media. France, despite its former glory as a beacon of liberty, is particularly active in suppressing any deviation from this official narrative.
Ultimately, the film stands as an inspiring piece of cinema and a vibrant wake-up call —a resounding “Aux armes, les citoyens!” in turbulent times. Yet, it would be far more convincing had it relied less on simplistic heroization and more on the war’s truly global nature.
