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[00:00:21] Hello, this is Garlic & Pearls, the podcast that looks at what makes the French so French and the British so British with Muriel Zagha, the Frenchie, and me, Suzanne Raine, the Brit. Hello, Suzanne. It's my turn to present this week. Today, I thought we'd talk about cinema a little bit more because many of you will know, and Suzanne certainly is aware, that I also work as a film critic.
[00:00:47] Besides my very absorbing day job with Suzanne at Garlic and Pearls. And so recently I went to a screening of a new French film about De Gaulle, who of course is a historical French figure who's appeared on this podcast a few times before, but never frontally as it were. So this film, it's the first part of a diptych, a wartime diptych about De Gaulle by a French director called Antonin Boudry.
[00:01:15] And I saw the first part, second part isn't out yet, but I'm looking forward to it. First part is called De Gaulle Resistance. And it spans the years 1940 to 1941. And then there'll be another part, which is called De Gaulle Liberté, which is the years 1943 to 1944. So it's really about De Gaulle in the war years. And we've talked about De Gaulle a bit in the context of May 68.
[00:01:44] And OK, so the French Institute in London, Charlotte, who took us around the Institute, mentioned De Gaulle and the Free French in London. So it is that very period. It's about what happens immediately after the defeat of France at the hands of Germany. And I thought it would make a good subject for a chat about this particular film, but maybe more generally about historical film.
[00:02:09] But because this film is about such a pivotal point in French history, but also our joint history, because it's also a period of time that was so crucial to British history. And we were allies. And that's that's also very garlic and pearls. We were allies, but he hated it, you know. And I thought you'd have things to say. Yes. He did. OK, so already I'm getting a bit of pushback, which is great. Well, isn't it? He hated it. Yes. He did hate it, didn't he?
[00:02:37] Yeah. No, no, he did. And also, I think why this is a good thing to discuss between you and me is because our trainings are so different. So I read English. I'm interested in fictions. And Suzanne is a historian by training. So we will inevitably be looking at something like this slightly differently and at historical films generally and historical fictions slightly differently. Or I hope we will. So should I just tell you a tiny bit about the film? Yeah. Because I don't think you have seen it.
[00:03:06] No, I've read a review of it. Have you? But that's good. So you don't go in completely cold. So the action begins in 1940 and with what's called the Bataille de France, the Battle of France, which is not, of course, as gloriously remembered as the Battle of Britain, because it's kind of the opposite of the Battle of Britain. In the last flurry of battles before the defeat of the French. And that was then followed, as you know, by an armistice signed with the Germans.
[00:03:35] And then the collapse of the Third Republic, the end of the Third Republic, where French Parliament handed full powers to Pétain, Philippe Pétain, Marshal Pétain. And he then establishes a new regime called l'État français, the French state. So no longer a republic, which is a dictatorship with its headquarters in Vichy. So all of this is going to happen.
[00:03:56] And then meanwhile, as soon as the war ends with the or goes into hiatus, you might say, de Gaulle makes the decision to fly to London looking for support for the restoration of the free France. So this is de Gaulle in 1940 and 41 in London and also elsewhere. I'll say a bit more about that. Meeting Churchill, seeking his support, trying to be taken seriously. This is the crux of the film, is de Gaulle.
[00:04:24] Trying to be taken seriously when he's pretty much on his own, on his own and claiming to represent real France. So he's just this guy who says, when everyone else around him in London says, but there is this new government that is now running France. And he'll say, no, but that's not real France. I am France. I and a handful of mad people who are following me.
[00:04:51] And who I've managed to talk into joining this slightly madcap endeavor. So he's busy chasing support from Churchill, trying to persuade the British, but also trying to rally the French empire to his cause, organizing networks for combat and for military intelligence. And then at the end of the film, it's 1941 and he's grown in stature, but there's still a lot of the war to come and a lot of de Gaulle's own journey to come.
[00:05:20] So very quick mini review. Is it good? Yes, I really enjoyed it. It's great cinema because it's basically a blockbuster. So the production values are really good. So you're immediately immersed. I saw it on the big screen. It's a very good war film. Is it one of the great war films of the ages? I don't know. Maybe not. But it is pretty good. It's very well done. And there are lots of battles. If you like battle scenes, you love it.
[00:05:47] And there is this very fascinating figure at the heart of it as well. So both drama and psychology. I have a question about battle scenes because I find battle scenes unwatchable because they're either close-ups with two people hacking at each other or else they're massive CGI things. Where you're just watching armies of people charging at each other. And then you get bombs and stuff. And it's all just sort of noise and blur.
[00:06:17] What type of battle scenes are these ones? So I read various responses to the film and I found a really interesting one by a guy who's clearly a pretty clued up military historian. And he had a lot of things to say about that. He said one thing that's really infuriating and that you see in Hollywood movies as well is if somebody shoots at a tank, it explodes immediately and becomes a ball of fire.
[00:06:44] When actually in real life, it will take a little bit more effort to total a tank. So it's things like that. You know, it's simplified. And of course, there is CGI. And there are also inaccuracies. So I'll come back to that later.
[00:07:00] But I can say straight away, this particular blogger said he couldn't not notice that in the opening montage, which is very dramatic, which is about basically Hitler invading everywhere and fire and destruction everywhere in his path. So you see a bit of Poland, you see Austria, you see Belgium, you see France, you know, and various bits of battles.
[00:07:24] And he says, at one point, there's a Soviet tank in there, which was not manufactured until 1944. And it's supposed to be 1940. And so, of course, people who know this stuff, and there will be a lot of people who are interested in the film who do know, are going to be really annoyed that they didn't take more care to iron out these kinds of inaccuracies. I'm possibly easier to please because I had to read about those inaccuracies. I didn't immediately notice them myself.
[00:07:53] But I went into the battle scenes as a, you know, innocent punter. And I learned a lot about them because the battles that are in this particular film are battles I hadn't really learned about properly at school. And I didn't really know what had happened. And so even with slight inaccuracies and simplifications, it was still incredibly instructive. I thought the battle scenes were very well done.
[00:08:22] To me, they seem to combine both. So you get a sense of the individuals who are caught up in them, the characters you're following. But there's also a real sense of massive fire and chaos and people trying to make sense of that. But I thought it was really involving. And as I say, quite illuminating from a, let's say, a sort of very basic historian point of view where I am interested in the period, but I'm not an expert.
[00:08:50] Because I suppose if you are a military history expert, you're going to be so unforgiving. It reminds me, this is a sidebar, but a lot of people will identify with this. When the film Dangerous Liaisons was released, you know, with John Malkovich and Glenn Close, the amazing adaptation of the French, 18th century French novel. I don't know if you remember the poster, but it's an image of Glenn Close unfurling an amazing, I think, black fan. And I happened to have a friend who is a fashion historian.
[00:09:19] Oh, who said. And he said to me, it's a Victorian fan. How could they use a fan that is not appropriate to the period? And for that reason, he refused to go and see the film. So, you know, you can get slightly bogged down. But I can imagine if that's the thing you know about in whatever. I mean, I find myself doing that on TV all the time. Of course. Some continuity error or something. And it just, it hooks into your brain and then you can't suspend the disbelief.
[00:09:49] That's exactly it. So I can't suspend disbelief when there's a character in something who is supposed to be French and is speaking French and is clearly not French. I can hear it. And I think, why couldn't you find a French actor, surely, for one line? It really, really annoys me. So we all have these things, these triggers. I thought the film really worked in terms of suspension of disbelief. You know, you've just said you need to be able to suspend your disbelief.
[00:10:16] The moment I saw on the screen, De Gaulle in uniform striding towards the BBC up Regent Street in 1940 London. I was there. And it's quite thrilling to see that. And so that's the first thing I want to talk about with the film is, isn't it the most crucial thing is the actor who plays De Gaulle? Because if you're going to have De Gaulle in almost every scene in the film, and it's about De Gaulle and the film is called De Gaulle Resistance.
[00:10:45] The person who plays De Gaulle has the really hard task of embodying this very familiar figure, because after all, it's not that long ago. I think people remember what he looked like. And there are lots of photographs. That is done brilliantly. The actor is called Simon Abkarian. He's French-Armenian. And he's absolutely terrific. It's uncanny. I mean, I know that, again, possibly a little bit of CGI, although I think in his case, it's mostly makeup.
[00:11:12] I think he spends not six hours in makeup, but one hour and 40 minutes or something he had to spend every day to get ready. And that included, I think, shaving his forehead and plucking his eyebrows and fitting some ear prosthetics, which is brilliant. And somehow also altering the set of his eyelids to stick them down somehow so that they looked more like De Gaulle's eyes. And it sounds outlandish, but the result is not outlandish. The result is De Gaulle, 849 in 1940.
[00:11:42] So he's also got the height and the bearing and the voice. So all these things and the profile. So especially when he's filmed in silhouette, it's really extraordinary. You feel like you are watching archive footage of De Gaulle. So in civilian life, he doesn't look like the Gaulle particularly. If you look at Simon Abcarrion, OK, he's a tall guy and he has a strong nose. And I suppose, you know, that's one step towards the Gaulle already, but it's not quite enough.
[00:12:11] But that's the performance. So really brilliant, absolutely fantastic. And without him in it, it wouldn't be the same. And surely that is incredibly important. I mean, do you remember the day of the jackal? Yes. Which one? The old one, the one with Edward Fox. Yes. I saw that recently, actually. It's such a piece. That's an amazing film. And of course, De Gaulle is in there, but by then he's President De Gaulle. It's the 60s. And so this is the film for our listeners who have not yet seen Day of the Jackal.
[00:12:40] Watch it immediately after listening to this podcast. It's about a hired assassin who is supposed to kill President De Gaulle, murder President De Gaulle in the summer of 1963. And in that film, De Gaulle was played by a French actor called Adrien Quela Le Grand, who hasn't really done anything else because he looks so like De Gaulle. Actually, that was the one part he could play.
[00:13:03] And I think when they were shooting the Day of the Jackal in Paris on site, a lot of Parisians thought that that was the goal in the street. They mistook him for the real De Gaulle. So you don't necessarily have to be a complete lookalike, but there needs to be enough space for illusions so that you can pretend to yourself that that person is there on the screen. So do you want to know who plays Churchill in the film or do you already know? I don't already know.
[00:13:30] And I would like to know because we've had endless Churchills over the years. So did you have a favourite Churchill? Was there one where you thought, oh, that's really terrific? I would always pick Robert Hardy because I like him. That's fair enough. And now I can't remember where he played Churchill, but he did, didn't he? Somewhere. Yeah, he did. I like him because he was Siegfried in All Creatures Great and Small and I've always liked Robert Hardy. Yes. So it's also to do with that.
[00:14:00] It's also if you know who the actor is, it's about the baggage that they bring. So with Churchill in this film, it's Simon Russell Beale. And you're so delighted when you see him because, of course, he's a great actor. You know, everybody loves Simon Russell Beale. Does he look like Churchill? Not really. But he's an amazing stage actor, Simon Russell Beale. So he does the voice to perfection and the mannerisms.
[00:14:25] And he sort of transforms himself in his bearing, you know, the way he stands and carries himself to move like Churchill. He doesn't look like Churchill, but enough. And the context is sufficient. And also because it's a French film for French people, it doesn't really matter because not to be rude or anything, but most French people would not know that that is Simon Russell. So they will just think, well, that's a British actor who plays Churchill and they'll be focused on the goal. It's all about the goal.
[00:14:55] Can I want to ask a question? Ask a question. I mean, as I just mentioned, we've had lots of films about Churchill in different ways. Films about Churchill or where he's a part of them in some way. And so we're all used to the sort of hero myth of Churchill. And you have your hero myth of de Gaulle. Yeah. But do you not have very many films about him? About de Gaulle? Yeah. Actually fewer than you'd think. It's interesting.
[00:15:24] I mean, there have been some and there have been some about this period. So it's not the first time that a film has been made about, you know, the free French and de Gaulle's decision to say no and to try and restart the war and reclaim France and all of that. But I think this is the most ambitious, this is the most ambitious film. And there is also a question of timing. My sense of it is that this film comes in a timely fashion.
[00:15:54] Partly, I say this because I read reviews and a lot of critics who went to see the film in France commented on the reactions of the audience. People who are watching the film, who are not critics, who are just ordinary filmgoers who paid for their ticket. A lot of people weep. A lot of people are deeply moved by the film. So that's interesting.
[00:16:16] And alongside this film, this diptych, there have been recently quite a few releases of feature films, but also television dramas that have run for a long time, very successful about the period of the occupation and the war. And it's not the first time that we've reflected on it. In the 70s, late 70s, early 80s, there were a few films about that period. But they were more sort of retro chic films, really, than anything else.
[00:16:46] Whereas there's a sense to me that enough time has passed that the French are ready to reassess that period. And I say reassess because, of course, we're looking at the period from where we are now. So we are inevitably going to colour. And this particular film we're talking about today is a 2026 film. And I'm sure that historians in the future will say that is a very 2026 response to the events of 1940.
[00:17:13] Because inevitably, we see past events through our sensibility now. But it's the right time. Also, presumably, it's a response to the events from 2020 to 2026, which... Of course. Our politics has all gone crazy. There's a war in Europe. I mean, I don't know what we know about the politics of the filmmaker. But presumably, he's trying to make a point about... He is. ...fighting for freedom and... He is.
[00:17:43] So, you know, you can sort of intuit the Ukraine-Russia war in the film. It's not explicitly there. But of course, you can't not intuit it. There are lots of parallels. And I suppose this film didn't initially... When it was released in France a couple of months ago, initially didn't do that well. It's now doing really well. And it's word of mouth.
[00:18:07] So that's also interesting because word of mouth tells you it answers something in people. It's what they want to see. And it's what they want to see, I think, partly because of that period being a difficult period in French history. And it's taken a lot of time to be able to face it, at least partially, at least obliquely, you know, maybe not completely frontally, but obliquely. And it's also, I think, because, as you said, war-torn times, terrible conflict everywhere.
[00:18:38] And at the same time, in France, we haven't been invaded for a long time. We've... A lot of younger people in particular have forgotten what war was to the French. And this film is a timely reminder, A, of what war actually is, B, of the decisions that have to be made and how sometimes, in a way, a simple idea cuts through. It's a reassuring notion.
[00:19:07] I don't know whether that would still work today, but some people have said, well, you know, there are still people nowadays who say no, who say, actually, no, we're not going to allow ourselves to be invaded. We're going to fight back. And I believe that we can push back. And this is the story of one such moment. It's a guy who looks a bit like a character from Alo Alo. Really? Well, he kind of came before the characters from Alo Alo, of course. So he...
[00:19:37] Of course. It's the Ur. It's the Ur character. It's the Ur French figure. That's... OK. So that's another aspect that I was going to come to that. I think what I liked about the film was it's reasonably reverential in that it's saying this is the story of a pivotal moment of history of a great historical figure in French history, but it's also quite funny and it doesn't shy away from the comedy of de Gaulle, of which
[00:20:05] he was himself, I think, completely unaware, which makes it even funnier, in that his physicality is amusing. He's quite cartoonish. He was. I mean, he was just abnormally tall. And then the military bearing and the seriousness, which is already a little bit comical. There are elements of... You know those films by Jacques Tati about Monsieur Hulot, like the holiday, Monsieur Hulot's holiday, that very distinctive silhouette.
[00:20:33] And I'm sure that Monsieur Hulot got a lot from de Gaulle, actually. He was also very tall. And so there's an element of physical comedy. There's an amazing scene where, for complicated reasons, de Gaulle and a couple of his entourage crash land in Africa, in the Congo, and they crash land into this lake. And what you see immediately before the crash landing is a flight of pink flamingos with their long skinny legs and then de Gaulle standing in the lake with his long skinny legs.
[00:21:02] So there are quite a few visual jokes like that, but it's not heavy handed or brilliant moment where he's in Brazzaville and it's all really sweltering, you know. And one of his, again, his aide de Caen says to him, beware the mosquitoes, General. And he says, mosquitoes do not bite de Gaulle. And then we cut to him delirious with malaria in the infirmary because, of course, he has been bitten extensively.
[00:21:31] But this is just gliding over, you know, it's not labored. You have a few scenes like that. It's very good because there's a lot of tension as well. So you need to laugh. And I think the film is very at ease with, we're talking about this great man, but we're not going to over mythologize or idealize him. You know, there's a scene where he's sitting outside Churchill's office waiting to go in to talk to him. And a few British ministers file past him. And this is before he's made any impact.
[00:22:00] So they don't know who he is and that he's there. And one of them says, oh, you know, this loser de Gaulle apparently wants to see Churchill. Apparently he has the hips of a woman and the head like a banana. And that's cruel. And then you look at him and you think, well, actually, he does look a bit like a banana. It's not completely unfair. So physically imposing, but also a bit sort of quixotic and ridiculous. A bit like one of those Giacometti sculptures, you know, where the person starts off relatively
[00:22:27] wide and then you end up with this tiny head at the top and then the peaked cap on top. Do they show how he ended up being the one? Because presumably he wasn't alone amongst, you know, people who thought that France shouldn't be allowed to be taken over by Germany. And again, sort of cutting to the present day.
[00:22:52] There's always this question that everybody's being patriotic, but they have a completely different idea about what should be done in the best interests of the country. So de Gaulle has his idea. Pétain had his idea. You know, you could argue now all the arguments that nobody's saying, I want to destroy France, but they're saying, unless you do what I want, France will be destroyed. That's right. So therefore, you know, the others are the people who will destroy France.
[00:23:22] And they're saying, no, we're the ones who are going to save France. And presumably, I mean, did he have rivals who also wanted to save France, but had different methods? Or did they all agree that he should be the embodiment of it? So I think he was pretty much the one. Not to say that there weren't dissenting voices in France at the time of the armistice and at the time of the establishment of the Vichy regime.
[00:23:50] But as you say, I think a lot of people might have thought, and you can see how that would have happened because of panic, because of an unprecedented situation that, well, we have Pétain, he's a safe pair of hands. He's an old military type, a hero. Everybody likes him. They trust him. He's a big father figure. He will protect us against the Germans.
[00:24:15] And then hopefully when the war is over and the Germans go away, I don't think anyone really thought in terms of this is a bit of a final commitment. You know, we have the benefit. We know what Nazism was and what the goals were. The goals were very long term indeed. I think the French, having just been invaded, were possibly thinking of it as just another war and not entirely clear as to what was at stake. Whereas I think the goal, partly because he was very cerebral and quite a rigid personality,
[00:24:45] he had, as he famously wrote, a certain idea of France, a certain idea of sovereignty.
[00:24:52] And I think it was unacceptable to him to have invaders on French soil and even worse, to have French people, albeit with good intentions for some of them, or short term intentions or, you know, a sort of double jeu strategy to sort of stay there and then roll with the punches and then get rid of the Germans somehow. That anyone should play along with the Germans. I think for him, it was very black and white in a way.
[00:25:21] You know, he was perhaps not the most nuanced of thinkers in that context. He was a very literate and well-read and cultured person. So not at all a blockhead. But I think he just obeyed his instinct there. There was a kind of patriotic instinct. What's also interesting, I won't go into too much detail, but you remember your amazing episode on cagoules? Well, I'm always thinking about him and a cagoule. We talked about the garment, the cagoule.
[00:25:51] And then at the end, we had a surprising little coda about the La Cagoule, which was a political organization in the 30s in France, which was an anti-Republican, pro-monarchy, very, very reactionary terrorist organization, really. And there's long been a rumor that de Gaulle, when he was a young man, was a sympathizer. I haven't found any hard evidence of that.
[00:26:13] But it's not impossible because I think he was by temperament a traditionalist and by temperament kind of a monarchist, really. He did entertain the project of maybe bringing back the monarchy alongside a Republican government, a sort of British compromise. And it didn't come to pass because the French would not have accepted it.
[00:26:36] So de Gaulle is middle-aged, conservative politically, an army man who's seen action. And he's not like, you know, when you think about the resistance in the Mecky and they're all young, idealist, communist guys who obviously want to fight Nazism and it's wonderful. And there is a character in the film who embodies that. So there are two narrative threads. One is de Gaulle's journey.
[00:27:04] And the other is this young guy who is a schoolboy, 17-year-old schoolboy in Paris, who hears de Gaulle's famous speech on the 18th of June, 1940, L'Appel du 18 juin, in which, so this is broadcast from BBC in London, where de Gaulle says to the French, all is not lost. Don't lose heart. We can come back. Don't accept this ridiculous situation. France will be saved.
[00:27:32] And this young man hears the broadcast. And what we see in his story in the film is the story of a political calling to the resistance. And he's, you know, associates with the left. Of course, all the lycéans and the students are left-leaning and idealists and all of that. So it's interesting to have the two sides. What you don't get in the film is the messiness of what happened in occupied France.
[00:28:00] This is not what the film is about. And in truth, you can find stuff about that in other films, in other TV series that have been made in France. But this is not about that. This is about the man who left not to flee, but to regroup and organize the return, the liberation. You're making me think about a parallel in neighboring Belgium, which was really interesting.
[00:28:29] And it obviously happened roughly around the same time, slightly earlier, when the Germans invaded Belgium. And Britain said to the king of Belgium, come here now. Come and be safe in London, because otherwise your country's been overrun. This will be the end of you. If you come here, you can be the headquarters of the free Belgians or whatever you call it. And we can fight together to get Belgium back.
[00:28:58] And the king was in this enormous quandary because he totally saw the rationale. And indeed, they went over. Britain sent over emissaries to go and see him. And they had these meetings. And they said, look, this is how we're going to do it. We'll get you out. You can be based in London. You can fight for Belgium. In the end, he said, if I stay, I'm the beating heart of Belgium. And the Germans can't get rid of that unless they kill me.
[00:29:28] If I go, I've gone. And Belgium will just be German. So he, in the end, took an incredibly difficult decision not to leave, but to stay and fight and be Belgium. And he was sort of punished for it afterwards. Because in order to stay, obviously, you have to compromise with the Germans, which I don't think he would. I'm speaking for the Belgian king now, but that was never his rationale.
[00:29:58] His rationale was if the Belgian people are being occupied, then I'm staying with them. Yes. And I'm going to fight with them for our liberation. Again, it's the same thing. Do I stay or do I go? Where can I be most effective? You're right. I think that's the difference, I suppose, between being the king, a figurehead who everyone knows and looks up to. And in the case of de Gaulle, being nobody at the time. Complete nobody.
[00:30:28] So there are quite amusing scenes. It's brilliant. When he first meets Churchill, Churchill is, of course, wearing one of his amazing siren suits. You know, the boiler suits that he wore made of red velvet. And de Gaulle is in full uniform with his hat and everything. So the discrepancy and height is very amusing. And they shake hands in front of a portrait of Elizabeth I. And you go, this historical moment is so exciting.
[00:30:55] I will add a little aside, which is a little special treat for our listeners who've listened to our episode on French villains in film.
[00:31:34] He can play an ultimate villain and also ultimate hero. There's nothing he can't do. So well done, Simon Abcarrion, for your versatility. So with that scene where they're shaking hands, Churchill in his siren suit, his sort of all-in-one smoking jacket and de Gaulle in his uniform, shaking hands in front of the portrait of Elizabeth I. My thoughts were panache. Remember, we did an episode on panache.
[00:32:02] And I thought, oh, you know, they really have dashed, these men. And what an amazing moment. And interestingly, that is a word that Churchill, Simon Russell Beale, uses later on about de Gaulle. He says to Eden, who is a lot more sceptical of de Gaulle's abilities or legitimacy. He says, allow me to appreciate true panache in a soldier. And that is quite stirring. Do you think he did say that? I mean, do we know anything about... No, no.
[00:32:32] I think a lot of the dialogue is totally made up. It is, you know. And sometimes it's obviously the case. For example, I don't think Churchill would have said to Eden, allow me to appreciate true panache in a soldier. Although it's a good line. And it did express what I felt at the time. So you feel seen, you know. One example, and I'll ask you a question. I'll ask you a leading question because you're a historically trained person. So the example is, there's a scene in the film at the very... Towards the beginning where de Gaulle is this chancer. Nobody knows who he is.
[00:33:02] Nobody will go with him. They're just, you know, he's talking and saying, since Clovis, France, blah. And I'm the next incarnation. And people are just looking at him as if he's completely unhinged. And then this contingent of Breton fishermen turn up in London. They found de Gaulle in London because they heard the appeal on the radio. And they all want to help in whatever way they can with their boats. Can they do anything to help the free French?
[00:33:32] And they're expressing all this in Breton dialect. And de Gaulle answers in Breton, okay, you can join me. And of course, I mean, it's sort of very stirring, lovely scene, but it's completely whimsical and made up. And as far as I've been able to ascertain, de Gaulle didn't really speak Breton, certainly not at that time in his life. I think he may have visited Breton later on when he was president and he learned a few words so he could say hello and goodbye and thank you, you know.
[00:34:00] So there are scenes like that where you go, surely that didn't happen. Then you look it up and you're right, it didn't happen. But there are other scenes that I had don't think I'd ever known about. For example, there's a beautiful scene where in Paris, school children, you know, big school children, teenagers and students organize a pro-resistance, pro-de Gaulle demo under the Ark of Triumph in 1940.
[00:34:27] And thousands of people turn up and then eventually they are dispersed brutally by the French police and by the Germans. And there are arrests and people get beaten up and so on. But I watched the scene and thought, surely did that really happen? And apparently it did happen. It did happen. So there were these really poetic moments. There are these really poetic moments in the film. Some of them are true to life and others are completely made up. I like fiction and I studied English literature.
[00:34:55] You, Suzanne, were trained to be mindful of facts, to be rigorous as a historian, always to question the source of what you're reading or seeing. If you watch a film and you notice or you learn later that there was a historical inaccuracy in a historical film, is that it for you? Can you not forgive that? Or do you sometimes forgive it?
[00:35:23] It depends on the agenda of the filmmaker, I think. Because history matters so much at the moment. I mean, because all history is subjective, I suppose. You can't ever get the ultimate truth of what happened before. But in order to get anywhere near the truth, you have to do a huge amount of research into primary sources.
[00:35:44] And if you haven't done that, then you are storytelling rather than presenting a historical record in a way. Because even the whole point about historians is that they just have micro arguments about the historical record all the time. So filmmakers, the chances of them getting it historically correct, completely, you know, it's pointless trying in a way.
[00:36:11] But at the same time, if you're telling a story which isn't really rooted in the history, then you should at least make clear what your agenda is. So a whole load of stuff that's been made in the last 20 years, where we've really started to use historical narratives to justify political positions. All requires, I would have said, something at the beginning which says, well, we've made this because our position on this is this.
[00:36:39] And we're trying to counterbalance prevailing arguments that say the other or whatever it is. That's where I find historical films particularly troubling. My problem here is that you keep selling me as a historian and I am not a historian of France at all. No, of course. And I know so little about, for example, Napoleon. And you just said, what I do know about is Clovis, because I did study Carolingian and Merovingian in France.
[00:37:07] That's my only area of expertise on France. It's very important. It was so interesting. And we, you know, obviously we did our little bit of studying about the Normans. But when you just said, de Gaulle said, I'm the greatest French person since Clovis, the obvious elephant in that room is Napoleon. So is he not saying, I'm the greatest Frenchman since Napoleon? Does Napoleon get a reference?
[00:37:36] In the film, he says, France has had some really important turning point in its history. Clovis, then Charlemagne. He does mention Charlemagne. And then he says, and then hopefully, you know, me now. Right. This is the film. I think de Gaulle, the person, was entirely aware of Napoleon and the debt he owed Napoleon. You know, this is interesting. Let's just take a little sidetrack just for a moment.
[00:38:02] I'm going to reference another podcast, which people might have heard about. It's called The Rest is History. Oh, no, no. I've never heard of that. If we can give them a mention and maybe send some traffic their way, because, you know, it's always nice to shoulder other podcasts. I think it's a couple of boys, isn't it, who are trying to... It's a couple of boys and they're trying to talk about history. They, you know, it's just a nice project and we should support it.
[00:38:29] So this is Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook, of course. And I remembered when I started thinking about this de Gaulle movie, that the very first episode of The Rest is History podcast, they're a little bit further ahead than we are. We are at sort of 100 plus. There are, I think, a thousand plus episodes. The very first episode was about the idea of greatness. And what does it mean, greatness? What is it? And why aren't people great anymore? Really, that was the question they asked.
[00:38:59] Before they launched into their glorious, you know, enterprise. And it's a very good episode. But they talk about, obviously, they talk about Alexander the Great, you know, you can imagine that they talk about Nixon and they talk about other people. Men are obsessed with discussing greatness, aren't they? Well, of course they are. I mean, they all start with Alexander the Great. It's quite reflective of a stage we're at in society. And where people project themselves and need, you know,
[00:39:28] they need inspiration, I suppose, or validation, I suppose, or whatever it is. Alexander the Great has a huge amount to answer for. He does. And then, of course, Napoleon. And so, yes, so they get to, because Tom is a historian of the ancient world and Dominic is a 20th century historian, really. So they get to more recent history and they get to Churchill and they say, well, you know, Churchill was a great man in the classical sense of the word.
[00:39:58] That's to say, at a time of crisis, he was the person who stepped up, who made decisions, who led the way, you know, and led the country out of this terrible crisis. And then they get on to France and Dominic Sandbrook says, I'm sure Macron has aspirations to being thought of as great. But is he? And then they say, well, Napoleon casts an enormous shadow on any French politician. And then, of course, the goal.
[00:40:27] And Tom Holland says the goal was great. He was. So, you know, you can argue, you can say, well, all these people were also human beings who are flawed. But if you start knocking about the concept of historical greatness, pretty soon, once you've talked about Nero or Alexander the Great or whoever, you're going to get to the Persians, you know, generally, you're going to get to Churchill and de Gaulle. And they are going to be in the mix.
[00:40:55] You know, however, you might want to criticize some of the other opinions or specific decisions that they took. Generally speaking, the picture is that they were great men. And when you're making a film about someone like de Gaulle or someone like Churchill, this movie, this de Gaulle movie, De Gaulle Resistance, I think it tries to do both. And I think it does succeed. It is a film that says de Gaulle was quite remarkable.
[00:41:24] He did something unprecedented and really courageous at a time when everybody else was going, well, let's see what happens. This is all very confusing. We don't really see the way forward. And at the same time, it accepts that de Gaulle was a bit of a ridiculous chancer in many ways. And it was by dint of repeating the same thing all the time, which is very French, actually. The French tend to hammer the same message all the time. Not very flexible.
[00:41:52] By dint of repeating, I am France, France will be free, we can free France. He got people to rally around him. It's an interesting phenomenon. It's not really Churchill's way. Churchill was a great orator. It's a different style. Whereas de Gaulle is more hammering the message repeatedly until people submit. And it did sort of work, although it's not just words that change things. It's actions. It's people making decisions in time.
[00:42:19] So the film also shows you how they brought the French empire on side, which was vitally important in order to have a base there for potentially reclaiming territory and also extra troops. Because at the time, that was thousands and thousands of people. That was one of the bits I really didn't know very much about. You know, I knew. So for example, really explained to me how important that was, bringing the empire on side.
[00:42:46] So sending a few of those madmen who had rallied around the goal. He just dispatches them from London to Chad and Cameroon and the French Congo, you know. And so you get, there's a brilliant soldier called General Leclerc, who I think will reappear in the second part because he is a great war hero, who is shown in a couple of little boats under cover of night, breaking into Cameroon with five other men in order to flip Cameroon over to General de Gaulle.
[00:43:15] So there's a boysen adventure element to the film, which, you know, again, you know, is probably being exaggerated and romanticized, but it's not entirely made up. It was a bit like that. And you know that in wars, that is often how things happen. You know, you're parachuted somewhere, you meet the right person or the door is half open or in this case, it starts to rain. So the sentries walk away to take shelter.
[00:43:40] And that's how they make their way into the consul's house and they force the situation. And then it's all lovely. I agree with you. I think with historical liberties, if we call them that, with a director taking liberties with history, I am very vigilant and anxious about it, like you. But I don't mind so much if the director is explicit and open about it.
[00:44:07] And he, Baudry, the director of this film, has said very openly in interviews, and he's been interviewed a lot because this is such a massive blockbuster commercial movie. He has said, and there's a little disclaimer at the end of the film as well that says that some scenes were, you know, invented. But he has said, of course, for example, the scene with the Breton fishermen, it's my imagination. And then the other thing is the story of that young man.
[00:44:34] So, you know, there's the de Gaulle arc, the story of de Gaulle, and then this young man, this young schoolboy, and how he becomes gradually more and more drawn into de Gaulle's orbit and the resistance. And then he joins a network. And then we see him move to Algeria, where his father lives, to be away from trouble because he's getting in trouble with the police because of his activities. And at the end of the film, so I won't ruin it, but for our listeners who want to see the
[00:45:00] film, at the end of the film, he commits an act, which is a serious act. And I remember at that time thinking, who is this boy and why don't we even know his name? Because we're not given his name at all during the course of the film. And then he turns out to be a real historical figure. In real life, he was a young royalist associated with the Action Francaise, which was an extreme
[00:45:26] far-right monarchist movement, very racist, anti-Semitic. I mean, just not particularly, you know, pleasant associations. And he committed a political assassination as a result of probably drawing lots with other people. So not particularly driven by conviction, but because he was part of a group and he was the who was picked for the job. In the film, he is incredibly pure of heart.
[00:45:53] He's this sort of idealized image of French youth who, you know, gradually comes to consciousness, political consciousness, understands that you have to get behind the goal, that France must be free and that there's a difficult price to pay. And sometimes that you end up, you know, lined up against the wall and shut for doing the right thing. So the director has said, I know what I did and I did it deliberately because there is an arc in this story of this real person, which fits my narrative.
[00:46:23] But I accept that I've made it poetic and romantic and simplified it enormously to get greater clarity to the story. So I think so long as we know this and we go in with our eyes open and we enjoy the film, as a semi-serious entertainment, I did learn a lot. As I said, I learned a lot of historical stuff. It really illuminated a lot of things for me. And in fact, I spoke to people after the screening. So this was a professional screening with other critics.
[00:46:52] And at the end, I asked the people sitting next to me what they thought. And many of them said, and of course, these are British people, but, you know, it's shameful that me being French, I felt the same way. They said, we learned a lot. We didn't know any of that stuff. You know, we had a vague idea of de Gaulle being the man who said non to us going into Europe. But actually, we didn't really know about the stuff that he did during the war and his travels to Africa and how, you know, a lot of sort of underground action that he did during the war.
[00:47:22] So the problem I've got, in a way, the problem I have with the introduction of not historically accurate things into something that is trying to be historically accurate is that when you then say, or they say, I learned a lot of history that I didn't know before. How are you in a position to judge which of that history is true and which of it has been, you know, just cushioned a little bit through some artistic license?
[00:47:52] And I just keep coming back to Alan McMaster's, the person who didn't invent the toaster. So that example that you're given of the boy who fitted a narrative arc, if you're not going away and reading what the director said about how he changed the character of this person, actually what he's done is he's created a sort of, you know, Joan of Arc figure who wasn't, whatever it is, you know, and that's now the historical record. You're quite right.
[00:48:21] I can see how difficult it is because you can't expect anything to be historically accurate and entertaining. But for people to come out and say, I learned a lot, you would want to be absolutely sure that they knew which bits of what they're learning are made up and which bits are actually broadly correct. I agree.
[00:48:45] And I would say, broadly speaking, don't change the character or the background of a historical figure and put them in your film as a completely different person. That's a bit much. It's one thing to say, oh, wouldn't it be lovely if some Breton fishermen had turned up in London? Because that's just so mad in a way that, you know, you go with it. But there's something a bit sort of troubling about the fiddling with someone who was a real person. Why not show him in all his complexity?
[00:49:12] The film took a lot from Julian Jackson's biography of de Gaulle, which is extremely detailed. And Jackson is very good at the complexities and the ambiguities, the ambivalences of all these people who sometimes had to turn their coats and change their minds. You know, it happens under pressure. So not everyone had clarity all the time. I suppose the good thing about this film, I mean, apart from the entertainment that it
[00:49:41] will give millions of people, which is not negligible, is that it started conversation about what really happened. And it will hopefully send people, as I did, to look things up and to work out exactly what happened and how the film was made. The danger is that 50 years later, in 50 years time, will we remember the kind of turns of the screw that were applied to historical facts?
[00:50:09] But that's true of so many historical films. Completely. It's probably, as you say, how do you make a historical film that is entertaining and gripping and completely pure historically, completely factual? Yeah, I mean, obviously you can't do that. And I'm now thinking that it doesn't really matter if the historical record now contains
[00:50:33] bunches of Breton fishermen rampaging around London, campaigning in a local dialect. So I think that's fine because hopefully it won't find itself onto Wikipedia. I mean, that's the thing is that things have become so much more porous nowadays because of things like Wikipedia, which you and I can edit if we want to, you know. So actually, technically, I don't think I'm capable of that, but you obviously are. I don't know how to do it, but I think we could teach ourselves.
[00:51:01] If you want, my takeaway at the end of all this, of the film is in a funny sort of way, much of the film talk at the moment is about the Odyssey, is about Christopher Nolan's Odyssey, which I haven't seen yet. And whether it's accurate and, you know, again, accurate, is it an accurate adaptation of Homer? Is it accurate to, I mean, historically accurate, people are saying. There are lots of questions about that. This De Gaulle film, in a way, I think why it appeals to people so much is because it's
[00:51:30] a bit like our own Odyssey, the French Odyssey, in a way. Although it is a historical story as opposed to a poem, it's about a warrior who's in exile and who wants to come home. And I think that's possibly why people cry in the cinema. Because that story of being exiled from home and wanting to come home and being a kind of
[00:51:54] stoic person who keeps pushing, persisting to try and come home and sort things out. It appeals to us all. It touches us all, you know, beyond being French or British or Greek indeed or anything else. De Gaulle has a problem in the UK. I mean, he just has a massive reputational problem, which is also probably not historically fair. And it's very much coloured by his subsequent actions, as you said.
[00:52:23] So if some good comes of this, it could be making British people see De Gaulle in a better light. Because we don't, I mean, I'll be honest, we don't see him in a good light. No, I think the film humanises him. I think, yeah, I think you'd probably as a British person watching the film, and again, a film that doesn't take De Gaulle too seriously, you know, so it's not poor faced about how he was a sort of saintly figure.
[00:52:52] It's not like that, that it will hopefully flesh him out a bit more, humanise him, give context. So yes, it's 1940, seen from 2026, but that can't really be avoided. But it's, I would recommend it. I think it's an interesting film. It's worth seeing. I'm looking forward to part two, which apparently is even better. Historical films are interesting. We can learn a lot from them. And just as a conversation starter, because it gets us to talk about, I think, interesting things.
[00:53:23] You know, the idea of greatness, the idea of being faithful to history and how you combine that with fiction, I think those are things worth discussing. I agree. So we'll leave it there. And I hope, listeners, you've enjoyed this episode. And we look forward to seeing you all next time to talk about something else. Au revoir, Suzanne. Au revoir, Muriel. Bye. Bye.