The General Who Was France
The De Gaulle Movie
General Charles de Gaulle was one of the genuinely towering figures of the 20th century, playing an heroic role in France's otherwise tragic Second World War, tarnished as it was by early surrender to the Germans in June 1940, then by collaboration under Petain's Vichy regime. So it's not totally surprising, I suppose, that there is now a new French film on release about De Gaulle's wartime leadership, or rather two films back to back. The first, Resistance, focuses on the general's often frustrated efforts (not helped by his own unbending aloofness) to convince the Allies that he alone represented France, while the second, Liberte, shows how ultimately these efforts paid off to enable De Gaulle (and his tiny army of Free French) to take a starring role in the liberation of Paris, to head up the subsequent provisional French government, to position France at the victors' top table (amazingly, despite having never fired a shot in Germany, the French were officially represented at the German surrender In Berlin in May 1945), and thereafter to encourage the post-war myth that France had successfully resisted the Nazis all along. The adviser on this ambitious film project - reportedly one of the most expensive ever produced in France - was the British historian Julian Jackson, whose magisterial 2018 biography of De Gaulle (A Certain Idea of France) provided the source material - and informs this post.
L'Etat C'Est Moi
Brits are used to thinking of Churchill as our great WW2 war leader, defiantly 'going it alone' against Hitler from mid-1940 when the rest of Europe had fallen under Nazi occupation. But the truth was that Churchill was still the leader of a vast global empire that was already receiving support from the USA. By contrast, De Gaulle was a relatively junior cabinet minister, a lowly acting brigadier-general, with no army behind him and precious few supporters, who had to flee to London from France, where Vichy soon condemned him to death for treason in absentia. It's no wonder that Churchill and his colleagues found the general's high-handed demands infuriating. But De Gaulle's position was largely misunderstood. His ambition went further than trying to raise a French force to fight alongside the Allies. Since France had surrendered, it no longer existed, De Gaulle believed. Vichy's treason meant that somebody else had to embody and represent France: that somebody was himself. And France's 'grandeur' (a favourite De Gaulle term) sometimes - all too often, others thought - demanded that he bite the hand that fed him. Roosevelt couldn't stand him and for much of the war the Americans put their money on a rival French general, Henri Giraud, who was less difficult. But by the end of 1944 De Gaulle had become the undeniable public face of French resistance, as much within France as outside it, a process of legitimisation that was underpinned by his regular BBC broadcasts to France from London. His first transmission took place on 18 June, 1940, four days before the French surrender: it was actually heard by very few people in France, but his was the first French voice to oppose the armistice, offering both a moral appeal to fight on and reasons why all was not lost. This on-going 'conversation' with the occupied French was all the more powerful for being conducted in secret in France, where listening to BBC broadcasts was punishable by death.
De Gaulle and Empire
What's striking is how much De Gaulle's role during the war takes us back to a time when big powers had empires. Not just Britain, but France too. De Gaulle much later (to justify conceding Algerian independence in 1962 after a vicious liberation struggle) adopted an anti-colonialist posture, but certainly during WW2 he was just as much an imperialist as Churchill. Indeed, it was a measure of how far France had fallen in 1940 that De Gaulle's only viable strategy to raise non-Vichy French support was to go first to France's colonies, primarily in North and West Africa. Some in these territories were loyal to Petain or conflicted, so finding Free French recruits was a slow and difficult process. It did mean, though, that the first significant France Libre forces were largely made up of Francophone black African soldiers. Over time, as the war swung against the Axis, increasing numbers of Frenchmen across the empire joined the Free French. The Anglo-American landings in North Africa in November 1942 (Operation Torch) initially faced some 125,000 Vichy French troops, but as the Allies advanced many of these enemy soldiers changed sides.
Bir Hakeim
This first major triumph for De Gaulle's cause had been preceded in the summer of 1942 by a heroic 16-day stand in the Libyan desert by some 3,700 Free French who found themselves surrounded by an overwhelming German-Italian force of 30,000. Though eventually forced to withdraw, the French bought vital time for the British Eighth Army, allowing it to retreat and regroup and go on to win a crucial victory at El Alamein. This Free French engagement at Bir Hakeim gets perhaps more than its fair share of screen time in the first De Gaulle film, but then, psychologically and symbolically, this was a turning point in France's long struggle back from national humiliation.
Why now?
By all accounts, the two De Gaulle films have proved very popular in France, with young people especially. I wonder why. Is it because a new French generation can now, like the British, enjoy their own war films at last, savouring a France that was not subjugated and not collaborationist? Or is it that the country today is so troubled politically, it prefers to look back to a time when it was even more divided but did eventually emerge from this darkness to victory and a shared a sense of unity and dignity. In reality, we now know, in 1945 that unity was fractured and dignity was fragile, for victory had come mainly through foreign intervention not the French Resistance. But that the perception of the French was otherwise enabled the country to find some kind of way forward out of its wartime trauma. For this It can thank De Gaulle.
If you think you know about WW1 and WW2, it's time to think again.
An Understanding History Podcast
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