cross-posted from my Substack:
I’ve been traveling in the UK and France for the past two-and-a-half weeks, which explains my silence here. While in Paris, I saw the newly released epic film devoted to France’s pre-eminent national hero, Charles de Gaulle, La bataille de Gaulle: L’âge de fer. The film, which attracted some attention at the recent Cannes Film Festival, calls for a brief comment.
De Gaulle has now been dead for well over half a century, enough time for the turbulence and controversy that surrounded him as long as he occupied the center stage of French history to have subsided and for his story to have passed into myth, as magisterially recounted more than a decade ago by Sudhir Hazareesingh in his In the Shadow of the General: Modern France and the Myth of de Gaulle. In 2005, French TV viewers—perhaps not the most discerning of judges—voted de Gaulle the greatest Frenchman of all time, edging out Louis Pasteur and Victor Hugo.
The film, by French standards a lavish production (and only the first part of a projected diptych), takes the mythical status of its eponymous hero as a given and recounts the “passion” of its hero-martyr as so many stations on the path to apotheosis. From the opening sequence, in which a fearless Colonel de Gaulle unerringly directs his nervous driver to steer right and left so as to avoid the shells launched by onrushing German tanks, to the final sequence, in which a temporarily sidelined de Gaulle is recalled to life (resurrected, as it were) by the timely assassination of Admiral Darlan by a youthful Hotspur, the viewer is not allowed to forget that Destiny has from the outset stamped its mark on the Savior of France. That the film fails to mention the fact that said young Hotspur, whose path from naïf to assassin forms an important subplot, is not so much an idolator of General de Gaulle as an illuminated young monarchist enlisted in the non-Gaullist faction of the Resistance led by Emmanuel d’Astier de la Vigerie is perhaps the kind of simplification required to compress such a complicated history into an already extended (157 minute) film epic. But the accumulation of simplifications leaves us with a film that steps beyond mythification into the realm of the fantastic. As I watched, I found myself carried back to my youth as an American child of the 1950s, reading comic books devoted to the derring-do of our valiant GIs.
This came as something of a surprise, because I had read that the film was based on Julian Jackson’s magisterial biography of de Gaulle. Hence I was astonished by the film’s depiction of de Gaulle’s crucial meeting with Churchill on June 17, 1940, the day before the famous Discours du 18 juin, which was broadcast from London to de Gaulle’s countrymen and established him as the leader of the Free French (even though almost no one heard the speech at the time). Jackson is at pains to point out that a previous biographer, Jean Lacouture, had inflated the significance of this encounter with Churchill: “This is splendid purple prose,” Jackson writes of Lacouture’s description of the scene, in which a perspicacious Churchill is said to have discerned qualities in de Gaulle imperceptible to others.;“It is not history. We do not know whether Churchill had such hallucinations [of de Gaulle’s tenacious genius] since he did not deign to mention that meeting with de Gaulle in his own memoirs. The truth is probably that Churchill, happy to welcome any Frenchman ready to fight on, distractedly made de Gaulle a non-committal promise about being allowed to broadcast, and had him ushered out as fast as possible so that he could turn to more important matters.”
The cinematic translation of Lacouture’s purple prose might have been redeemed by actors capable of imparting some nuance to the confrontation, but what we see is rather the transformation of the purple into the screaming red italics of those WW II comics I ingested so hungrily as a child. Churchill gruffly clamps his lips around his cigar; de Gaulle, impassive as a statue, as he remains throughout the film, does not so much as move an eyebrow.
The director, Antonin Baudry, comes to the comic-book style naturally. He is the author of Quai d’Orsay, a rather stylish reconstruction in bande dessinée format of Dominique de Villepin’s resistance to the American invasion of Iraq in 2003, which Baudry witnessed at first hand as a foreign ministry staffer. I confess that I rather enjoyed Quai d’Orsay. Unfortunately, I can’t say the same about this first half of the de Gaulle epic. Perhaps I remember too many of the WW II films I saw in a later stage of my childhood. Anyone who has seen the 1967 film Tobruk, for example, will know that there was more to the desert war than the Battle of Bir Hakeim, which of course takes pride of place in this very Franco-centric nationalist epic. It is perhaps not a mystery why a French director might think this a propitious moment to issue a resounding cocorico by contributing yet another embellishment to already towering edifice of the Gaullian myth. I may have a heart of stone, but I’m afraid this extravagant effort left me quite unmoved.