De Gaulle: Liberté · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

Picture the paper first. In 1942 the RAF scattered copies of Paul Éluard's poem “Liberté” over occupied France — the poem that ends by naming the thing itself, j'écris ton nom, I write your name. Antonin Baudry handed his second de Gaulle film that line as its alternate French title, and it tells you exactly where to point your eyes. This is a movie about a man writing a country's name across a country that, in the years it covers, does not officially exist. France has fallen. Its legal government sits at Vichy. A two-star general with no territory, almost no army, and no chair at anyone's table keeps insisting — into a microphone in London, across a negotiating table in Algiers — that he is France. The whole suspense of the film is whether the sentence comes true.

Deleuze had a precise word for what de Gaulle is doing, and it isn't lying. He called it fabulation: the act of legending, of telling the story of a people that has no ground under it yet, so that the telling becomes the ground. It sounds mystical until you watch it operate. In the Algiers sequences the general confronts his American-backed rival Henri Giraud (Thierry Lhermitte, cast clean against his comic reputation) with nothing behind him but the claim itself. He has no mandate. He behaves as though the mandate is obvious. Deleuze's point about modern political cinema is that the people are missing — they are not a given the leader represents but something still to be invented — and de Gaulle's France is exactly that missing people. He does not speak for a nation that stands behind him. He speaks so that one will arrive.

This is why the older label on the film — “powers of the false” — is the right instinct pointed at the wrong altitude. The finest node is the one under it. Deleuze's faussaire, the forger, is not a con man to be unmasked; he is the figure who does not report a truth but makes one. De Gaulle's proposition, “I am the legitimate France,” is, strictly, false in 1943. Roosevelt (Campbell Scott) does not grant it. Churchill (Simon Russell Beale) grants it grudgingly and takes it back. Giraud disputes it outright. And yet the claim is not a lie awaiting exposure — it is a truth being forged in real time, and the film's tension is simply whether the forgery will hold. That undecidability, truth and falsity suspended so that something new can be willed into being, is the power of the false working as a creative principle rather than a deception.

Notice where Baudry puts the drama. Not on the battlefield — the tanks of Leclerc (Niels Schneider) rolling into Paris are the payoff, not the engine. The engine is the room. In Deleuze's terms the action is transposed into a Figure: legitimacy is not seized by force, it is performed as discourse and posture. De Gaulle wins by refusing to be seated as a subordinate, by holding a bearing the room must either accept or break. Baudry has built this chamber dramaturgy before — Quai d'Orsay turned French statecraft into corridor theater, Le Chant du loup made protocol and listening into suspense — and here it inherits directly from Diplomatie, where the fate of Paris hangs on two men in one room, and stands beside Darkest Hour as its cross-Channel companion piece. Against the more conventionally patriotic De Gaulle of 2020, Baudry's reading is colder and stranger: sovereignty as a thing you talk into existence.

That performance is why the casting matters as a concept and not just a credit. Simon Abkarian is no prosthetic double; the reporting stresses bearing, cadence, interiority over mimicry. Deleuze would call this a gest — an attitude of the body that exposes a social relation rather than illustrating a feeling. Abkarian's stillness at a table is the argument for de Gaulle's sovereignty; the posture carries the claim the words cannot yet prove. And because the general's true weapon was the voice — the radio appeal, the broadcast, the Éluard title foregrounding language as such — the film leans on the speech-act, the testimonial voice that legends a nation instead of merely conversing within it. When de Gaulle speaks into a microphone to a country that cannot answer, speech stops being dialogue and becomes an act of founding.

What does this do to the biopic? The genre is the most confident of movement-images: great men perceive a crisis and act, and the action resolves the world. Baudry keeps the shell and hollows the engine. His hero cannot act militarily on anything that matters — he has no divisions of his own for most of the story. His only power is to speak a France that isn't there until it is. Baudry has taken the most action-bound of forms and rebuilt it on fabulation, on the forger's undecidable claim, on a people who are missing and must be called. That is the significance worth naming: a heritage epic, shot against the real stone of the Panthéon and the Gare de l'Est for documentary weight, that locates every ounce of its drama in the powers of the false.

Watch it, then, for the moments when nothing is being done — a pause before answering Roosevelt, the set of a jaw across a table — and ask what is being written into existence in the silence. That is where the film lives, and where a defeated general made a country say its own name back to him.