The battle to bring General de Gaulle to the screen

One of the cultural events of this summer in France has been the huge success of two Pathé blockbuster films, collectively titled La Bataille de Gaulle. Directed by Antonin Baudry, they are based on my biography of General Charles de Gaulle, A Certain Idea of France, with Simon Abkarian in the lead role. At the last count, over five million tickets had been sold since the films were released in June. They recount the General’s Second World War. The first, Résistance, begins with his arrival in London in June 1940 and ends in December 1942 with the assassination of his Vichy rival Admiral Darlan. The second takes the story up to the Liberation of Paris and ends with a moving scene portraying de Gaulle and Churchill together on 11 November 1944.

Political and cultural commentators have pored over the reasons why the films have caught the French public imagination. Some have highlighted practical considerations, such as the attraction of sheltering for five hours in air-conditioned cinemas during France’s hottest ever summer. Others see the films as offering an uplifting history, with an authentic French hero, at a time of pessimism about the nation’s decline and general disillusion with its current leaders. The films have resonated surprisingly strongly with young audiences. I have received messages from young viewers who said that they were stirred to tears.

At the same time, professional historians have weighed in to lambast the film’s many historical inaccuracies. This raises a more general question about the relation between history and film: how does one film history? What liberties can filmmakers permit themselves with historical ‘truth’? A feature film may not be a documentary, but are there not rules that must be respected? No rules apply, it seems, to the liberties taken by opera composers such as Verdi and his librettists when depicting real historical characters such as Don Carlos, since these are just hooks to tell a romantic story. No one goes to Bellini’s I Puritani to learn about the English Civil War. But once a film claims to portray history, things become more complicated.

The idea that a single historical truth exists is already a problem. The justly lauded television adaptation of Wolf Hall  (based itself on a historical novel by Hilary Mantel) portrays a very particular vision of the Tudor statesman Thomas Cromwell with which not everyone will agree. But everyone can agree that it is an authentic, legitimate and interesting interpretation. Conversely, it is wrong to think that documentaries offer an objective truth that films do not. The greatest historical documentary ever made, Marcel Ophuls’ The Sorrow and the Pity (1969), offered a generation nurtured on heroic tales of the French Resistance a revisionist portrayal of the conduct of the French under Occupation. The ‘truth’ that this film offers is artfully constructed and, although nothing was ‘invented’, the elements were organised to offer a partial vision of history.

What about the 2018 film Mary Queen of Scots, ostensibly based on the biography by John Guy, which contains a scene where Mary meets her nemesis Elizabeth – an event that never took place as every schoolboy knows. Does this matter? Quite apart from other elements of the film that might cause historical problems, this was surely a justifiable artistic choice, which allows the conflict between the two queens to be explored in a dramatic and compelling way. Similarly, on the London stage in 2016, Jonathan Lynn’s play The Patriotic Traitor  ended with a meeting between de Gaulle and Pétain in 1944 when Pétain was in prison awaiting trial. Such an encounter never occurred – the two men saw each other for the last time in 1940 – but it is an excellent device to allow them to have a dialogue about the very different choices each made in 1940. The imaginary conversation – which had been going on in their heads for four years – offers historical insights that transcend the simply anecdotal fact that the meeting never occurred.

A contrary case might be the notorious scene from the 2017 film Darkest Hour  in which Churchill is seen meeting the public on the London Underground. Their support gives him the resolve to carry on. The anecdotal fact that Churchill probably never set foot on the Underground is not important, but the scene, which shows assembled Londoners, men and women of all ages, and even a black man – all that is missing are representatives of the LGBTQ ‘community’ – cheering Churchill, so screams inauthenticity and phoniness that it detracts from everything that has gone before. Similarly, Ridley Scott’s Napoleon  (2023) may be full of unimportant historical inaccuracies, but the real problem is that it offers no compelling vision of its hero except that he seems only interested in rutting with Josephine. On the other hand, Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette (2006), despite being swamped in bold anachronisms (a punk soundtrack, a character wearing trainers), does seem to capture some poetic truth about a woman crushed by, and in rebellion against, the rituals of the French court.

How do the two de Gaulle films measure up by comparison? Since they were based on my own biography of de Gaulle, and since the director Baudry was keen to have me involved, showed me versions of the script, and would consult me on points of detail, I am in a position to discuss these questions to some extent from the inside – even if in the end it is Baudry’s film and no one else’s. For a historian trained in the academic dressage, where everything needs to be referenced and footnoted, this experience was a sharp learning curve. My pavlovian historical pedantry – ‘no that is wrong, it didn’t happen like that’, ‘you have these events in the wrong order’, etc – was quickly slapped down with the reminder that this was a film not a documentary.

There were occasions when I would note points of historical details that could be corrected in order not to offer an easy flank to critics. For example, an early version of the script had a scene where a Jew is wearing a yellow star in Vichy Algeria. When I pointed out that the star was never imposed in Algeria, the scene was cut out. (An eagle-eyed friend, however, noted a scene in Britain showing in the background some cattle of a breed that was not imported to the British Isles until many years later.)

On another occasion, Baudry invented de Gaulle waking up in a cold sweat after having a nightmare about Darlan. When I objected, Baudry rightly retorted: ‘so how do you know he didn’t have a nightmare? Do you have archival access to all his dreams?’ I withdrew gracefully and now regret that the scene ended up on the cutting-room floor. Another scene that jarred with me was the one where de Gaulle in London is confessing to a priest, Thierry d’Argenlieu, who was also a naval officer and became a figure in the France Libre. Having de Gaulle confess to d’Argenlieu struck me as corny and implausible. I now see that it condenses a lot of elements in a form easily grasped by the viewer – not least de Gaulle’s Catholicism.

Sometimes Baudry’s choices did not convince me. At the end of the first film, when it looks as if Darlan has put an end to de Gaulle’s career, we see him bidding adieu to his followers and leaving his HQ for the first time in civilian clothes. Although de Gaulle was in despair over this turn of events, I am convinced that he always believed he would prevail in the end. His despair was a bluff whereas Baudry’s version shows him as having given up. Since de Gaulle was subject to violent mood swings, this interpretation is possible, but I am not convinced.

At first, I was disturbed by what was left out. There is nothing, for example, about the Levant in 1941, which caused the first bust up between Churchill and de Gaulle. Once the British and Free French had taken the French mandates, Syria and Lebanon, back from Vichy in 1941, de Gaulle became convinced that the British were trying to take over the French Empire. We see nothing of this, and the film skips over 1941 entirely. Baudry’s justification was that there is a limit to how much detail an audience can take in, and that there were so many other reasons for de Gaulle and Churchill to fall out that it was not necessary to add this extra layer of complication. The point was taken. In truth, although the film does simplify for clarity, what is remarkable is how much detail it does manage to cram in. I doubt whether most even relatively well-educated French people would have known anything about – or even heard of – René Pleven, Admiral Muselier, General Catroux, or even been able to say much about generals Koenig and Leclerc. In this respect, the film plays a significant pedagogic role.

There are parts of the film that have caused some gnashing of historical teeth. One of these is the Battle of Bir Hakeim in North Africa in June 1942, in which the Free French held off Rommel’s forces for 16 days, facilitating the British fall back to the Mediterranean coast. The depiction of this battle over about 15 minutes is one of the most powerful scenes in the film – and will be an eye-opener for most French people who know Bir Hakeim only as a bridge in Paris – but a distinguished British historian remarked to me sardonically that seeing this film one might think that France, not Britain, had won the war in the Western Desert. Surely this misses the point. This is a film about the Free French. For de Gaulle, it was the first time that his men had been able to fight directly against the Germans since 1940. This David vs Goliath moment was massively important for the international prestige of de Gaulle’s movement. A pinprick in the wider history of the war, it was in some sense the France Libre’s Stalingrad. The film distorts nothing there.

Another aspect that has aroused historical criticism is the depiction of the young resister Fernand Bonnier de La Chapelle. His story is told in parallel to de Gaulle’s in London. Bonnier is there partly to show the impact that de Gaulle’s speeches were having in France – to give flesh and blood to the Resistance – and because his romantic personality mirrors de Gaulle’s. But – spoiler alert – he also plays a crucial role in the denouement of the first film when his destiny and de Gaulle’s interact. He is the person who, by assassinating Admiral Darlan, paves the way for de Gaulle to take power in Algeria. Bonnier La Chapelle did exist and he did indeed assassinate Darlan. But the film invents a lot about him and says nothing about the monarchist plotters of whom he might have been the instrument in North Africa. It depicts him as a solitary idealist and also invents a girlfriend who plays an important role in the second film. Does this matter? Fernand gives the film a romantic élan and, although liberties are taken with his story, he fulfils his purpose in the film’s artistic contraction. If this were a Fernand biopic, these inventions would be a problem, but not in this film about de Gaulle.

In the construction of the film, it was fascinating to see a talented film-maker with respect for history, taking my book seriously but reading it sometimes differently from the work I thought I had written. Baudry has said on many occasions how he is fascinated by the Don Quixote-like elements in de Gaulle’s character, the touch of craziness that underpinned his extraordinary self-belief and the moral courage, which sustained him in the first two desperate years in London (at the end of his life de Gaulle himself made the Don Quixote comparison). But there is another side to de Gaulle – calculating, cynical and rational – which the film glosses over, though not entirely. In one of his cataclysmic bust ups with Churchill, it is clearly suggested that de Gaulle’s losses of temper were often play-acting when, a minute after having smashed a chair in a quarrel with Churchill, we see him charming Churchill’s wife, Clementine.

Overall, one of the strongest features of the film is the strange relationship of wary mutual respect and admiration combined with bouts of exasperation and fury that made up the relationship between these two men. Would de Gaulle have said ‘Winston’ as he does in one of their early scenes? I am not sure, but it conveys well the ‘bromance’ between these two extraordinary figures. Simon Russell Beale offers a brilliant performance as Churchill, the force of which comes from the fact it is an interpretation, not an impersonation.

The film also vividly conveys how solitary and isolated de Gaulle was in his first months in London, despised by most of the French community there and by much of the British establishment. In the tiny apartment he occupies at the start of his period in London, this man who is claiming to represent France has no more than a bed, a bath (we see him in the bath), a desk and two or three chairs. It is in this spirit that Baudry invents the comic character of Blazej, the Polish plumber who comes into the flat where de Gaulle is living to mend the pipes. He ends up as one of the ragbag army of the Free French – commenting on the bad plumbing in Carlton Gardens – but he is there to make a point, in a light-hearted way: that de Gaulle was initially so desperate that he would take almost anyone who presented themselves.

A later scene depicting de Gaulle’s first week in London is even more improbable. He is asked to address an audience of British diplomats, politicians and journalists. He has been given an English text to deliver but throws it away dismissively. Entering on stage, he seems paralysed by stage fright, stands rigidly, salutes and leaves without saying a word. One French historian criticised this scene as totally implausible, but this is a case where fact is more curious than fiction. That scene did take place, and the next day one newspaper headline read ‘the Silent General’.

It is this depiction of de Gaulle’s early vulnerability that has made people respond to the film so emotionally. Another strand that explains its impact in France is the one which has excited the most historical criticism: the way it tells the story of de Gaulle’s relations with Roosevelt. The second film portrays a ruthless US president doing everything he can to sideline and exclude de Gaulle from any influence in Liberated France. To show this, the film centres on AMGOT (American Military Government of Occupied Territories), the plan to treat France as a liberated country to be run by American administrators. There is no doubt, as historians have commented, that the film overeggs the AMGOT story – as de Gaulle did in his own memoirs – but the narrative is, in essence, correct: Roosevelt, shocked by the French defeat of 1940, did take the view that France had no right to claim any kind of great power status; de Gaulle was the obstacle to these plans. That AMGOT was not as fleshed out a plan as the film suggests is immaterial.

In the current international context, where Europe is discovering how unreliable the United States can be as an ally – a theme of de Gaulle’s throughout the 1960s – this theme resonates. In the second film, one character remarks ironically: ‘the Americans are so good at running other people’s countries’. This gets a hearty laugh in French cinemas. It is worth remembering in this context that Baudry, before becoming a film-maker, was a diplomat and civil servant. He was in the cabinet of the French Foreign Minister, Dominique de Villepin, who made the speech in New York in 2003 opposing the US attack on Iraq. Presumably, Baudry had these parallels in mind. Finally, one ambition of this film has been to take on Hollywood and show that France, too, can make successful blockbusters. La Bataille de Gaulle is France’s answer to Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey.