ewsba.se
In the summer of 1942, a cash-strapped William Faulkner signed on to work at Warner Bros. as a screenwriter, earning three hundred dollars a week. His first task was to whip up a biographical treatment of General Charles de Gaulle, leading the Free French government from exile in London. Provisionally titled “The De Gaulle Story,” the project was intended as hagiography—explicitly so, as President Franklin Roosevelt had proposed the idea to Jack Warner, hoping to boost de Gaulle’s credibility with the American public. Faulkner gave the gig his best shot, producing some twelve hundred pages and entertaining fussy notes from French consultants. (A memo titled “Observations on Inexact Details” cautioned, “In a cafe in France one does not play dominos but cards or billiard.”) Ultimately, Faulkner found his protagonist so hard to pin down that he purged the bio from the bio-pic, instructing a colleague, “Let’s dispense with General de Gaulle as a living character in the story.” The script was soon relegated to oblivion.
Churchills and Roosevelts—not to mention Hitlers—abound in cinema, but, even in France, bringing de Gaulle to the big screen has historically been a fraught enterprise. As the British historian Julian Jackson has written, postwar filmmakers strove to emphasize the collective nature of resistance rather than focussing on a single great man; yet, when de Gaulle returned to power in 1958, becoming president after more than a decade’s retirement from politics, it was with such command that, as Jackson puts it, “to dare to ask an actor to portray de Gaulle himself would have been an act of lèse-majesté.” (The director Réné Clément solved the problem by using archival footage whenever the General’s presence was required.) Pierre Schoendoerffer and Bertrand Tavernier both tried to make de Gaulle films and failed, the latter surely unhelped by his producer’s insistence that the lead character be played by Gérard Depardieu. Then there was the challenge of de Gaulle’s distinctive physiognomy. Such were the sensitivities surrounding him and his myth that a single actor—the towering, schnozzy, serviceably chinless Adrien Cayla-Legrand—maintained an effective monopoly on the role for decades. It wasn’t until 2020 that the first full-scale feature film devoted to the General, Gabriel Le Bomin’s “De Gaulle,” premièred in French theatres. It closed just ten days later, with COVID-19 advancing like the Panzerjäger-Abteilung 187.
This is all to say that Antonin Baudry knew what he was getting into when he signed on to co-write and direct the most ambitious, improbable de Gaulle movie yet: “La Bataille de Gaulle”—a two-part, five-plus-hour epic, based on Julian Jackson’s nine-hundred-page biography “A Certain Idea of France.” (The book's title alludes to the opening lines of de Gaulle’s own memoirs: “All my life, I have had a certain idea of France.”) The film captivated France this summer, and the first part opened last week in the U.S. Its timing has certainly been fortuitous, with France facing a Presidential election that may put the far right in power for the first time since the Vichy regime. But when we met recently, at a café in the Luxembourg Gardens, Baudry told me he believes that the film has resonated largely because of its human element. He looked chicly rumpled in cream trousers, a button-down, and white leather high-tops decorated with red lightning bolts. He said, of the filmmakers who preceded him, “I understood the malediction—none of them had dared and managed to crack the character.”
Baudry, who is fifty-one, began his career far from the moving image, studying math before earning degrees in engineering and literature from France’s arch-prestigious grandes écoles. (He managed to slip in a film-studies minor, with a thesis on Wong Kar-wai.) After graduating, he entered the French diplomatic corps, where he worked as a speechwriter to the Foreign Minister at the time, Dominique de Villepin, and at least partially authored his famous speech at the United Nations, opposing the Iraq War. After that, he pseudonymously co-wrote a graphic novel called “Quai d’Orsay,” after the seat of the foreign ministry. The book—a juicy look at the inner workings of foreign-policymaking—was a hit, selling more than sixty thousand copies of its first edition. Having proved himself as a sort of beast of the French establishment, devouring the competition in every arena he entered, Baudry volunteered to co-write a film adaptation. Then he decided he wanted to be a director. Casual. So he wangled a meeting with Jérôme Seydoux, the chairman of Pathé film company, and persuaded him to finance a nuclear-submarine thriller called “Chant du Loup,” which premièred in 2019 to warm reviews and respectable takings.
For the de Gaulle project, Pathé gave Baudry carte blanche and an initial seventy-five million euros, an unheard-of budget for a French production. (The film was called “La Bataille de Gaulle” in France but is known as “De Gaulle” in the U.S.) It focusses on the critical years of 1940 to 1944, beginning, in Part 1, with de Gaulle refusing to join the collaborationist Vichy government and ending, in Part 2, with his triumphant return from exile during the Liberation of Paris. Baudry had a breakthrough when he and his co-writer, Bérénice Vila, who is also his wife, started thinking about de Gaulle as a figure spiritually not of the mid-century but of the Middle Ages. “I realized that de Gaulle was a modern Don Quixote,” Baudry recalled, citing the General’s “denial, his stubbornness, his readiness to die rather than admitting the unbearable reality that France had capitulated.” Once the notion of de Gaulle as a knight-errant had clicked, Baudry and Vila came up with a tactic to alleviate the pressure of his legend: as they wrote, they called their hero “Robert” instead of “Charles.” They emphasized the initial lostness of his cause: a mad band of marginals, holding on to France out of unaccountable faith, rather than a reasonable chance of wresting control from Vichy. By that point, Baudry recalled, “I had my character in my veins, and I was going to make these films.”
For the title role, Baudry cast Simon Abkarian, an actor best known for his work on the stage. The film took a hundred and fifty gruelling days to shoot, with reports of delays, quarrels, and a generally trying atmosphere leaking from sets in Paris and Cherbourg. Several months into filming, some twenty crew members quit, including the first assistant director and the director of photography. After filming finally wrapped, in 2024, post-production took more than a year, and Part 1 missed an anticipated release date in 2025. When it finally premièred, in May, at Cannes, reviews were mostly positive. Les Cahiers du Cinema criticized its formal “heavy-handedness” and its “idealized vision” of France, but critics in Le Monde and Le Figaro loved it. “De Gaulle” had won a battle, but it had not won the war.
The first installment hit French theatres in June, to dismal ticket sales. Baudry, meanwhile, was M.I.A., still editing the sound for Part 2. “I honestly didn’t give a shit about the noise outside the mixing room,” he recalled. The film’s producers, hoping for a turnaround, moved up the release of the second installment to coincide with la Fête du Cinema, a nationwide promotion offering discounted tickets. (The films’ full titles—“La Bataille de Gaulle: L’ge de Fer” and “La Bataille de Gaulle: J’Écris Ton Nom”—were unwieldy enough to cause at least one moviegoer, yours truly, to accidentally see the second part first.) Executives overhauled the marketing campaign. Seydoux told me, “We had a crisis meeting, and I said, ‘We have a rifle with only two shots.’ ”
Then came a third, lucky blast—record-breaking heat, which sent people flocking to the cinema, one of the only reliable places to find air-conditioning. By its fourth week in theatres, “La Bataille de Gaulle” had seen admissions surge by seventy per cent. Word-of-mouth took over, and, suddenly, “La Bataille de Gaulle” was a sensation. I heard chatter about it, in the course of a few days, from both a government minister and my boxing coach. “It’s French panache!” Le Parisien crowed, heralding “a fiasco turned triumph.” The trajectory was almost embarrassingly de Gaullian: a crazy project, flailing and discounted, mounting a gritty comeback that would subsequently be treated as inevitable.
In late September, Jérôme Seydoux was sitting in an orange chair at a huge circular conference table on the top floor of Pathé Palace, his company’s Paris headquarters. He has piercing blue eyes and the plain confidence of a man born to industrial wealth—his mother was a member of the Schlumberger oil dynasty—who managed to conquer another field completely. (He is also grandfather to the actor Léa Seydoux.) At ninety-two, he is something of a cross between Louis B. Mayer and Willy Wonka, confecting France’s major films according to a proprietary formula of market savvy and personal conviction.
Seydoux and Baudry like to say that the “De Gaulle” project took shape out of serendipity: over lunch, they discovered that they were both reading the Julian Jackson biography. But in a way Seydoux has been preparing for much longer to make such a film. “I am an old man, and the story, to some extent, is the story of my life,” he admitted. Seydoux witnessed firsthand the Liberation of Paris, in August of 1944. “We tried to go to the Champs-Élysées, but we didn’t make it, because we were crossing the Tuileries and there were people shooting on the Rue de Rivoli,” he recalled. “The soldiers advised my mother to have us all go under a truck to be protected.” Another day, he and his sister were forbidden to go outside, but they snuck out and saw a German tank. “Kids were able to move because nobody would stop them,” he said.
Making a wildly expensive diptych about a long-dead, famously wooden statesman was a gamble, surely, but it conformed to a strategy that Seydoux has pursued to success in recent years,. This involves taking canonical French stories and turning them into “grandes fresques historiques,” the kind of lavish historical epics at which Hollywood once excelled in the nineteen-fifties and sixties. The movies are old-fashioned, and they are expensive, but they have proved adept at drawing big, cross-generational crowds to physical theatres. Pathé’s “The Three Musketeers: D’Artagnan” was the third-highest-grossing French film of 2023; the next year, its “The Count of Monte Cristo” took second place. “It’s this sort of instinctive I.P.,” the film critic Jordan Mintzer told me. “We have Marvel. They have Dumas.” The advantage of resurrecting a wartime superhero is that the world he saves is our own, though “De Gaulle” would have been a very different proposition if it had followed its protagonist into the years of the Algerian War, decolonization, and student revolt.
Roosevelt, played by Campbell Scott, is a far more sour, transactional figure than the morally driven humanitarian we know from American history books. Churchill (Simon Russell Beale) waffles and feints as much as he blusters. Baudry told me, “This is the first time we’re seeing this full history through own our lens.” Call it a reverse Pepé Le Pew, flattening Anglo-American icons to give some space not only to de Gaulle but to his internal antagonists and allies and to the French people themselves. Niels Schneider’s sensational performance makes you long for a spinoff two-part, five-hour bio-pic of the Free French general Philippe Leclerc. Baudry’s dramatization of the Germans' violent crackdown on dozens of mostly young, civilian protesters on November 11, 1940, is among the most moving set pieces I’ve seen, incorporating real archival footage and a narration of Paul Éluard’s 1942 poem “Liberté. And nobody who has seen this film will ever forget the Battle of Bir-Hakeim.
There are many ironies to “De Gaulle”—a great-man bio-pic distinguished by its ensemble cast; an anti-American, or at least American-agnostic, film done in high Hollywood style. But its biggest contradiction might be the fact that it is both avowedly antifascist and profoundly patriotic, a film about resistance that could be seen as almost reactionary in its insistence on the purity of de Gaulle and his cause. During our coffee, I asked Baudry whether he’d had any reservations about making a movie that is so overtly, even unfashionably proud of France. He answered in a sidelong way, saying that he hadn’t anticipated the powerful frissons of pride that many moviegoers had reported feeling. Weeks later, I received a long text: “I keep thinking about our exchange in the Luxembourg Garden,” it began. “I don’t want to sound naïve on this,” Baudry wrote. Part of the problem, he said, was that “the far-right has managed to monopolize patriotism,” confiscating “our flag and our pride.” He brought up American exceptionalism, and said that “De Gaulle” does not try to argue for a French version. “It doesn’t say that the French are better than the Spanish, the British, the Americans,” he said. “It just shows people trying to save their country which is France and which they love.”
“Why now?” is an irksome question to impose on an artist, but with Europe struggling to assert itself against an increasingly aggressive American hegemon, and people all over the world searching for models of resistance against autocratic regimes, Baudry is not oblivious to the film’s broader resonances. “I thought to myself, It’s Trump-Zelensky!” he told Le Grand Continent, of a scene in which Roosevelt and de Gaulle face off at the Anfa Hotel, in Casablanca, in 1943. Baudry told me that the current political situation put him in mind of the words of Edward Grey, the British Foreign Secretary in 1914: “The lamps are going out all over Europe, we shall not see them lit again in our life-time.” He continued, “That was true, and that’s a little bit what we’re fearing now.” “De Gaulle” joins a slew of other recent French movies about the Second World War, including “Notre Salut,” a drama by Emmanuel Marre about his collaborationist great-grandfather, and a starry bio-pic of the French Resistance leader Jean Moulin. But “De Gaulle,” like its hero, stands out for its willingness to be true to itself, and even a little weird. Baudry brought up Don Quixote again. “A knight devoted to his lady isn’t necessarily convinced that she is technically more beautiful than, say, the king’s wife,” he told me. “He just thinks she’s perfect, and he’ll die for her any time if needed.” It’s a certain idea about a certain idea. ♦