In times of crisis France always turns to de Gaulle

French cinemas were packed out this summer by audiences lapping up a two-part film history of the wartime exploits of General de Gaulle, directed by Antonin Baudry.

I have seen only the first part – La Bataille de Gaulle: L’Age de fer – which takes the story to early 1943, just after the assassination of Admiral Darlan in Algiers.

It is a fine piece of filmmaking.

Simon Abkarian, who plays de Gaulle, catches the General’s mannerisms as well as his imposing stature.

It is apparently one of the most expensive French films ever made, with a budget of €74million.

It should, eventually, repay its investment: though one senses the huge audiences are using the film as some sort of comfort blanket, and that boosting national morale in France after a few rocky years might be deemed worth more than turning a profit.

A France in need of leadership?

After all, since Emmanuel Macron’s petulant decision to call a parliamentary election in 2024, which most sensible politicians knew he had no chance of winning, France has not been governed well, or with any sense of strategy or underlying vision, but rather from day to day as the President clings to his authority by his fingernails.

France is not alone in this; all major Western European countries seem to be suffering from political dysfunction and underperformance, not helped by the fact that the Continent’s main ally has a madman in the White House.

However, rather like Britain after Margaret Thatcher, contemporary mediocrity is offset against an era of firm and unequivocal leadership within living memory.

De Gaulle is not merely one of the key figures of the Trente Glorieuses, but he is also central to the myth that allowed France to have the Trente Glorieuses in the first place.

Without him the country would not have been liberated, but would have remained under the German jackboot.

I use the word ‘myth’ to qualify that statement advisedly.

The de Gaulle myth

De Gaulle’s iron belief in the invincibility of France, and in his own unique incarnation of an undefeated France, were certainly crucial to the maintenance of morale of those in Occupied France who wanted the Germans out.

However, the fact remains – as Winston Churchill, played by Simon Russell Beale, reminds de Gaulle in Part One of the film – that France was defeated in June 1940, that it signed an armistice with its conquerors, that the most strategically important parts of the country (the Channel and Atlantic coasts) were occupied and controlled directly by the enemy, and that the rest of France was turned into a puppet state of the Nazis.

De Gaulle’s activities cheered up many in France, especially in the Resistance, but his detachment from reality infuriated Churchill and caused Roosevelt to loathe him.

I regret not yet having been able to see Part Two [due for UK release on September 19], because it will have to deal with the other part of the de Gaulle myth. By this I mean his statement – in some respects the most blatantly dishonest public relations stunt of modern times – to the people of Paris in August 1944 that they had ‘liberated themselves’.

They had done nothing of the sort.

Having fought their way for two and a half months through northern France from the Normandy beaches, American, British, Canadian and a comparatively small contingent of Free French paused at the gates of Paris and, by agreement with de Gaulle, allowed French troops to march first into a capital that was being rapidly evacuated by the Germans.

The myth that France had ‘liberated itself’ was not only offensive to the Allies with their thousands of dead, but it was burdensome to the French for decades to come.

A nation built on a shared story

De Gaulle got away with it for two reasons. His people had nothing to gain from not believing him; and his Allies had an interest in France uniting and stabilising as swiftly as possible after the war.

However, the myth required the complicity of the French who had lived through the war and the liberation, and who knew what had really happened.

It was one reason why, at the very end of de Gaulle’s presidency, the government banned screenings of Marcel Ophuls’s epic documentary Le Chagrin et la Pitié, which exposed the extent of collaboration and the limited heroism of the French themselves.

By then, de Gaulle had established himself as the father of the Fifth Republic; France had put behind it the embarrassing instability of the Fourth Republic in the 1950s; and he had, with some ruthlessness, extricated France from Algeria.

In short, de Gaulle had restored order to a disorderly country and, echoing Harold Macmillan, most people in France had never had it so good. That, as much as his wartime myth, was why he was considered a great leader.

The future of La Boisserie

Following the death in 2024 of his son Philippe, de Gaulle’s house, La Boisserie at Colombey-les-Deux-Eglises (Haute-Marne), is the subject of a controversy as his four grandsons quarrel over what to do with it.

This is complicated by the fact that one, Pierre, is an admirer of Vladimir Putin, and there are fears this important historic property might end up being owned by Russians, or other undesirables, if Pierre succeeds in buying out all his siblings.

President Macron has said that the house should be bought by the state and become a national monument, which of course is right.

For all his faults, de Gaulle is probably the greatest Frenchman since Richelieu (Napoleon ended badly; Clemenceau’s truculence over the Versailles Treaty was one of the causes of World War Two) thanks to his ability to pull the country together after 1958.

He has no obvious inheritor, although Républicain and Rassemblement National candidates will doubtless claim the mantle in next year’s presidential campaign.

No new de Gaulle is likely to emerge, which is all the more reason for the French to revere and create a monument to the original one.