Should we consider Charles de Gaulle a “great man” in the mould of those other giants of modern European history: Napoleon, Bismarck, Garibaldi, Churchill? When Churchill himself was asked this question, he is said to have replied: “A great man? He is selfish, he is arrogant, he believes he is the centre of the world. He… You are quite right. He is a great man.”
Courtesy of the historian Julian Jackson, we have long had a book capturing De Gaulle in all this infuriating, paradoxical greatness. A Certain Idea of France (2018) stands as one of the great biographies of the 21st century, a masterpiece of storytelling and scholarship. Now we also have a film, De Gaulle: Resistance, based on Jackson’s work, directed by Antonin Baudry, a former cultural ambassador of France and former adviser to Dominique de Villepin, a one-time French prime minister.
The film opens in 1940 as the German Blitzkrieg powers into France. The French are falling back and all is seemingly lost. But then here comes our hero, unruffled, daring, absurd. De Gaulle, played by the excellent Simon Abkarian, is being driven in a polished motorcar, giving orders to advance towards the enemy lines. In fact, not only does De Gaulle advance, he drives right up to the German tanks, offers himself as a decoy to one particularly menacing machine, drawing its fire to allow the French forces to fight back. So De Gaulle is introduced to us: not the uptight old man of later life, but the all-action hero of his youth, a modern Joan of Arc – a defiant embodiment of France and the film’s title: resistance.
The scene is, of course, cartoonishly extravagant. But so what? It is a dramatisation, not a documentary. Soon, though – despite De Gaulle’s Rambo heroics – France has fallen and this jumped-up general is on his way to London, the only place he is able to escape the shame of his country’s capitulation. “France has had its ups and downs since Clovis but it stands by its allies,” De Gaulle announces theatrically on arrival. It “stands by its allies”? Who is this absurd character, the British wonder? France is finished; defeated and, worse, shamed – it has collaborated with the enemy.
From here the audience is offered an alternative portrait of De Gaulle’s greatness, rarely seen in France: heroic, but also tragi-comic. “Do you speak English?” he is asked in London. “No, I am French.” And all of France laughs. But it isn’t just eccentric Gallic pride that we see. The audience is shown the great man mocked and humiliated by the “tight-arsed English”, returning to his cramped apartment, alone in the bath, sobbing at the shame of it all. In a later scene he contemplates suicide after another defeat. But still, he doesn’t give up – he keeps buggering on.
Soon, we are introduced to the other great characters in this drama. Churchill (a bravura Simon Russell Beale) is flamboyant where the general is formal; exuberant where he is curt; drunken while he is sober. But, in reality they are more star-crossed lovers than bitter enemies: a pair of romantic old dreamers, stubbornly holding on to hope against the barbarism of modernity. De Gaulle is to France what Churchill is to Britain – the embodiment of its national spirit, with all its hopes, fears and neuroses thrown in.
Their quarrels and tiffs are magnificent to behold. “I did not know it was carnival,” De Gaulle says disdainfully to his host one evening, after Churchill greets him at the door, dressed up in a silken creation. “Not everyone wants to dress as the unknown soldier,” Churchill replies with a smile. They dine together and reminisce late into the night. Churchill’s favourite tune, we learn, is a French soldier’s song. The pair – both veterans of the First World War – sing gently to each other over brandy. Are such scenes too sentimental? I found them among the most moving in the film, a reminder of a genuine entente that was not just political, but cultural.
De Gaulle: Resistance is joyous precisely because it leans in to its romanticism. It does not try to be too clever by injecting modern cynicism or ideology.
De Gaulle is not the only hero, either. Other greats of the French Resistance are introduced: the Free French generals Leclerc and Kœnig; the underground leader Jean Moulin; and the future prime minister René Pleven. Yet, the most dashing counterpart to De Gaulle here is a lesser-known figure, Fernand Bonnier de La Chapelle, a dashing patriot who provides both a love story and a blood sacrifice that turns this biopic into something far more: the story of modern France. And it is a story that still happens to be narrated by De Gaulle.
The film portrays Churchill, for example, as a great man eventually forced to bow and scrape before Franklin Roosevelt. This is the Churchill of De Gaulle’s telling. As Jackson notes in his biography, De Gaulle believed that Churchill was “magnificent until 1942” but “then, as if exhausted by the excess of effort, he passed the flame on to the Americans and abased himself before them”. De Gaulle, in contrast – or so De Gaulle would claim – did no such thing. “America will win this war and reign supreme,” he declares in the film. “All other states will be vassals. France must remain sovereign.” And so we have modern France’s guiding principle – or the one, at least, that it projects. Unlike Britain, France has retained its grandeur, its dignity, its sovereignty. Unlike Britain, it has an independent nuclear deterrent, an independent foreign policy, and even today independent artificial intelligence.
Baudry’s film tells the French who they are. Yes, they were humiliated by collaboration, but they resisted – and that matters. The film goes further than this too, placing the battles of the Free French at the centre of the overall war effort. It was, we learn, their sacrifice that allowed Britain to have its Dunkirk; their sacrifice that allowed Britain to have its El Alamein.
However much I enjoyed the film, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that it commits the very fraud De Gaulle’s most astute critics level at him: creating a myth that his country cannot ever live up to. Gladwyn Jebb, Britain’s postwar ambassador to France, levelled the charge most eloquently: “Undoubtedly, the General’s chief failing was to cast his country into a role which was beyond her power.” According to this argument, modern France and, by extension, modern Europe, continues to be held back by the fantasies of greatness that De Gaulle created and films like this celebrate.
Gaullism, so its critics argue, is the delusion of grandeur holding back modern France, just as “Churchillism” – our bulldog, backs-against-the-wall island spirit – plays a similar role for Britain. France, in this telling, is forever caught between the competing aspirations of national pride and geopolitical reality. The country has concluded that it can only break from US dominance through European integration, but it can never quite do what is necessary to lead Europe because it remains too French. And so the tragic cycle rolls on: Britain and France forever destined to lose themselves in scenes of old glory rather than embracing the future.
When I spoke with Baudry after watching the film, he rejected all this. “I’m not trying to make the assumption that France is big,” he told me. “I’m just trying to show the story of people who wanted to save their country.” Indeed, when De Gaulle was asked which historical character he would compare himself to – Joan of Arc, Napoleon, Louis XIV? – he replied that his only rival was Tintin. “We are the small who refuse to allow ourselves to be cheated by the big.”
In A Certain Idea, Jackson concludes that De Gaulle “probably did overestimate the role that France could realistically play in the world, but his response would have been that it was better to err in that direction than the other.” And, as Jackson put it, erring in this direction was the genius of De Gaulle: “The ambition was what mattered.”
The film ends with De Gaulle on the verge of defeat, but saved by an act of providence, as the heroic Fernand takes matters into his own hands in a way I will not spoil on these pages. In France today, there are suspicions about Fernand’s motives – and his masters. Was he an independent actor as the film depicts or an agent of other powers: De Gaulle himself, perhaps, or Churchill, or – mon dieu! – the Americans?
“Historians don’t agree,” Baudry told me when I put this to him. “Some think that he was working for the Italians… because his father was Italian. Others that he was working for the royalists… [but] I think we have to give a chance to that boy to think by himself. Because I think that’s what these people were doing when they were confronted by the occupation of their country. I think this guy decided to sacrifice himself for his country.” The truth of the matter is not the important point here, but the lesson. You do whatever you have to do. Independence matters. Principles matter. Deeds matter. And ideas matter.
In De Gaulle’s War Memoirs, he explains his own philosophy of life, and leadership. “However difficult reality might be, perhaps I would be able to master it, to quote Chateaubriand’s phrase, ‘by leading the French there through dreams’.” Leading the French through their dreams is what Baudry has done too. “The reasonable last, the passionate live,” the film declares. If that is the mythology modern France wants to adopt for itself, that seems fine to me. Vive la passion! Vive la résistance! Now let us do the same here.
De Gaulle: Resistance is in cinemas now
[Further reading: The last days of the Bourdain Bro]
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This article appears in the 20 Aug 2026 issue of the New Statesman, Summer Special
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