As French cinema continues to embrace large-scale event filmmaking, Antonin Baudry’s “De Gaulle: Résistance” arrives as Pathé’s latest ambitious historical epic, following the blockbuster success of “The Count of Monte Cristo” and “The Three Musketeers” diptych.
The first installment of a two-part saga chronicling Charles de Gaulle’s wartime years, the film world premiered out of competition at the Cannes Film Festival, where it drew warm reviews. Variety hailed it as “a proudly French and massively scaled production with the energy of a vintage Hollywood blockbuster” — one that “interrogates the past and sheds some light on the present.” The film has also been critically praised for Simon Abkarian’s performance as De Gaulle, as well as its exploration of the French leader’s tumultuous relationship with Winston Churchill.
Released in French theaters on Wednesday, the big-budget feature has gotten off to a healthy start at the box office and is expected to be one of the country’s major local hits of the summer, with “The Sovereign Edge” set for a July 3 rollout.
Baudry is no stranger to ambitious filmmaking. The former diplomat, who worked at France’s Foreign Ministry, the Quai d’Orsay, before turning to cinema, previously directed the acclaimed submarine thriller “The Wolf’s Call,” widely regarded as the first French film of its kind. His background in international affairs has continued to inform his work, and nowhere more so than in “De Gaulle: Résistance,” which explores the political maneuvering that shaped France’s future during World War II.
Ahead of the film’s release, Baudry spoke with Variety alongside his producer Axelle Boucaï (“An Officer and a Spy”) about revisiting one of France’s most iconic historical figures, challenging conventional narratives of World War II, and why he believes de Gaulle’s story resonates in today’s fractured world.
De Gaulle is such a well-known figure in France — someone we learn about in school. What made you want to make a film about him, and what did you want to tell that people maybe didn’t know?
First, there’s this figure of someone who’s alone and who manages to create a wave of people supporting him. It takes time — two years. He’s someone who turns a dream into reality. Because reality was capitulation. The dream was: France can’t accept this. People accepted the dream. That fascinated me — this lonely guy who believes in his dream against everybody and makes it real. It’s the opposite of the role France knows so well, the president of the Fifth Republic. The other thing is that after living five years in the United States, a country I love, I came back to France and felt I was discovering a new country — one far more under American cultural domination than I’d thought. It pissed me off a little. I thought, this is something I could help change. When I read Julian Jackson’s biography of de Gaulle, it opened the door. Jackson paints a very fresh portrait, maybe because he’s British and isn’t overwhelmed by the political figure the way the French are.
Why is World War II still so fascinating to storytellers?
Because this is the moment where the balance of power shifts and gives birth to the world we know today — where the British become dependent on the U.S., and Europe starts to lose its own narrative. Ever since, our narrative in Europe has been written by the Americans, to be honest. Seeing World War II from a perspective that isn’t British or American felt interesting not only for the French, but for everybody, including the Americans. My American friends who saw it said: “It’s the first time we see World War II from a perspective other than the one we know.”
We grew up thinking the Americans liberated France and Roosevelt was a hero. The film suggests that without de Gaulle, France might still be German.
Roosevelt had chosen Darlan, a Franco-like figure who could have maintained a military dictatorship. The Americans liberated France, but it didn’t come without the Free French fighting to make France free. The fact that they picked a Vichy figure shows they didn’t have de Gaulle’s ideological drive. He just wanted to get rid of the Nazis and have a free France. The Americans didn’t care that the guy was a former Vichy figure — for them, what mattered was sparing American lives, so they allied with whoever allowed that.
And yet the film weaves in reminders that this wasn’t just a war — that there was a genocide.
The moral aspect of war is important. That’s a bit what’s often missing for the Americans when they intervene. War, for de Gaulle, is a moral matter. Churchill and de Gaulle share a romantic vision of history — romantic in the sense that it’s not only efficiency that counts. American rationality is very focused on efficiency; morality doesn’t have a disproportionate importance. Two visions of the world, opposed at that moment. That’s what’s interesting in the second film — the way Churchill is caught between the two, needing Roosevelt to win the war while sensing he doesn’t agree with what he’s doing in Europe.
What drove those first men who chose to follow de Gaulle when victory seemed impossible?
Most were. They committed to a cause lost in advance — sentenced to death, families harassed, all for a chimera even they thought would never succeed. But it was a question of honor. Pleven was different — very morally upright. He hesitated for weeks; we have the letters to his wife. He feared de Gaulle might be a dictator. A military man taking civilian power, in France, recalls Napoleon. But de Gaulle was the only one in London with the clear conviction that you had to say no — that the armistice was a slippery slope to total submission. And he was nobody: a small, provisional general, stripped of rank and nationality and sentenced to death the day after his first BBC speech. What I find interesting is that he rallied people through reason and the heart, not through unleashed passion. Hitler was the first rock star. De Gaulle was the opposite — he said the same thing all the time and never gave up.
We don’t learn this in school. Why?
Partly because of de Gaulle himself. After the war, his obsession was to reunify France, so he embellished the story, implying all the French were behind him except a few traitors. Not true at all. I made this film partly against de Gaulle’s Memoirs — a book I love, but historically reconstructed. It was foreigners — Jackson, and Spanish and German authors — who told the real story. It’s often like that.
It was Spanish anarchists who entered Paris first. And France would not have recovered without Africa. Félix Éboué, from Guadeloupe, the first French prefect of color, was the first to rally to de Gaulle. The Americans had a rule against having Black soldiers in armored divisions, so Leclerc — whose biggest contingents were African — had to part with a third of his men to keep his American equipment. Without the Africans, France would have remained the France of Vichy.
The film gives a lot of weight to young people. What role did they actually play in the resistance?
A major one. Between the capitulation in June 1940 and that November, the entire French population was in shock — even those who, deep down, would never accept Nazi Germany at home didn’t know what to do. They couldn’t even talk to each other, because they didn’t know who was who, and they were threatened. The first signal given to the world that there were people who didn’t want the Nazis at home was given by high school students. It’s the November 11 demonstration at the Arc de Triomphe — major and barely told in history books. There’s a documentary, made in the ’80s, where the participants, then in their sixties, say it was the most important day of their lives, and that they had no idea while going. It was spontaneous, organized high school by high school. They thought they’d be fifteen and get arrested before reaching the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. In fact they were three thousand, stunned to be three thousand. For a few hours they overwhelmed the police and the German soldiers, who didn’t know how to react, and they had the feeling they’d retaken Paris — until the German intervention.
So that event led by French youths created a spark?
Adults across France thought: if the kids are doing this, maybe we should do something. I love the story of a young high schooler, like Fernand, who was imprisoned, released months later, and called in by his principal: “You’re really a little idiot, what did you learn?” And the kid, sixteen, replied: “But sir, I did it for you.” The fact that children stood up where the army hadn’t — I find that not only moving but a bearer of hope. I didn’t want to make a film about this period without showing that, because it seems to me really major.
Casting de Gaulle with Simon Abkarian was bold.
For me it was obvious — I needed the best possible actor. During the war, the Americans actually wanted to make a film about de Gaulle, and it fell to a young William Faulkner. By the final draft, Faulkner wrote to his producer that they should drop the de Gaulle character — first because they’d never find an actor capable of playing him, and second because the Americans paying for it wouldn’t appreciate the character. So there’s this irreproducible quality from the start. I needed an actor at the peak of his mastery, with a touch of madness, capable of sharing emotion while playing a character hell-bent on not showing any. With my co-author Bérénice, we spotted Simon early and concluded it was him or no one. When he was a kid in Lebanon, his friends called him “de Gaulle” — there was something of destiny in it. The search for the character went largely through the voice. When an actor has the gaze and the voice, he has the character. He doesn’t play on charisma — like de Gaulle. He invented a character. But when I watch him, I see de Gaulle.
What about Simon Russell Beale who is equally convincing as Churchill?
For Churchill I also needed the best — Simon Russell Beale, considered the best actor of his generation in England, the English Gérard Philipe. He’d played Churchill twice before and wasn’t happy with it, so he wanted his revenge.
From the start you wanted two films?
One film wouldn’t show the carnal, complex, twist-filled side of the fight, or the English perspective. At one point I thought it should be a series, but I didn’t want to make one. The two-film idea came from a lunch with Jérôme Seydoux and immediately won me over — two films felt like the right measure for the 1940–44 period. Each twist hangs by a thread, and it’s all real. When Leclerc went to take the government palace in Cameroon, he was blocked until it started raining — torrential rain — and that’s not invented. At Dakar, the opposite: de Gaulle nearly killed himself, for real, because French had fired on French. A moral failure he had to overcome.
And the scope of the production?
Around €70 million — We had about 190 sets, 150 actors, giant constructed sets, tanks. My battle at every moment was getting the money on screen — we were often in short-film economy mode so all of it would show. Simon Russell Beale’s agent messaged me after the teaser: “It looks like a €200 million film. How did you do that?” France should reclaim the idea that you can make films with real cinema resources. People say “it’s American-style,” but cinema doesn’t belong to America. There’s nothing American about this film — just quality, resources and ambition. The problem on big French films is usually the script, the foundation. Here we had both the scope and the script.
How did you make sure the film was accessible?
We challenged ourselves in editing, showing it early to people who knew nothing — including vocational students and kids from disadvantaged high schools — asking, “At what moment do you stop believing?” Not understanding one point isn’t a problem if it doesn’t break the overall story. I wanted it fluid, with several levels — enjoyable as an adventure film on first viewing, with more to catch the second time.
Why does this film feel so timely?
Because the world born from World War II — where the British became dependent on the U.S. and Europe began losing its own narrative — is the world that’s crumbling today. And there’s something in the youth story that speaks directly to now. We’re in a world where we feel constantly overwhelmed by forces much larger than us: artificial intelligence, the destabilization of the climate, big economic forces beyond control. Our generation, and even more the children, sense that everything is beyond them, and a little despair is emerging. To see kids who had soldiers on their street, and who a few months later managed to overturn the course of French history, federate the resistance — I find that a source of hope. The film is, above all, addressed to young people.
Do you think the film will find a home in the U.S.? Americans might be annoyed at how they’re portrayed.
Maybe — but right now they’re very self-critical. Americans of all sides, liberals and Trumpists, told me it fascinated them, and our New York test screening scored very well. It’s a perspective they’re not used to. We show a facet of Roosevelt they don’t know, but that doesn’t erase what he did elsewhere — the New Deal. People are complex, especially heads of state exposed at high temperature. I’d love Americans to see this film. The U.S. is dear to me — I lived there five years, one of the most interesting experiences of my life, and I came away with my two best friends, which is no small thing.
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