Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of De Gaulle: Liberté
2026 · Antonin Baudry · De Gaulle: Liberté on Sightlines
Start with the voice. Baudry took several of de Gaulle's wartime radio addresses and folded them into a single scene, because, as he put it, no film could stage every broadcast. It is a small editorial decision, and an honest one. It is also the whole film in miniature. A man with no territory, no election behind him and a borrowed base in London speaks into the air, and a country is supposed to answer.
Simon Abkarian built that voice with Baudry in a mixing auditorium, working through the archival recordings. He wasn't trying to imitate the general. He was listening for the music underneath, the cadence rather than the timbre. Abkarian is not a physical double for de Gaulle, and the film doesn't pretend otherwise. Costume, hair and makeup give you the silhouette. The voice does the rest. Hold on to that, because it is where Deleuze becomes useful.
The first film, Résistance, told how an obscure two-star general appointed himself the voice of a defeated nation in 1940. Nobody gave him the job. Deleuze has a figure for this, which he takes from Nietzsche: the forger. He doesn't mean a con man. He means someone whose truth does not exist before he declares it. The claim becomes true by being acted on, believed and repeated, until everyone is standing on it. In 1942, “Free France” is exactly that kind of claim. Liberté covers the three years in which the claim has to turn into a fact.
The French subtitle tells you so. J'écris ton nom, “I write your name,” is the refrain of Paul Éluard's clandestine 1942 poem “Liberté.” A nation's name being written back into existence. Deleuze's word for this is fabulation: a people caught in the act of telling a story about itself that brings it into being. He links it to a hard idea from his account of political cinema, that “the people are missing.” By this he means a film can no longer assume there is a people out there waiting to be filmed. It has to help call one up. Occupied France, split between Vichy, London, Algiers and the internal Resistance, is a people that has to be summoned before it can be shown.
This is why the lens opens the film up rather than just decorating it. Deleuze thought that subject belonged to modern cinema, the films made after the war that had lost faith in heroes acting on the world. Liberté is not one of those films. Baudry has said plainly that he wanted the forward drive of an adventure film, not the reverent museum manner of the historical picture. Its grammar is what Deleuze calls the large form of the action-image: a vast situation, here a world war, presses on a hero until his actions transform it. So the film tells a forger's story in a classical grammar, the grammar of things that are simply true. You can feel that tension the whole way through, and it is the most interesting thing about the film.
Watch the cutting. Rehman Nizar Ali and Katie McQuerrey had a choral story to manage: Jean Moulin, Leclerc and others on parallel tracks, with de Gaulle fighting the Germans, the internal Resistance, his rival Giraud and the doubts of his own allies all at once. Their answer is systematic alternation. Battles in the desert and at sea cut against clashes of ego in London, Algiers and Washington. Deleuze calls this American organic montage, the inheritance of Griffith: separate lines that feed each other and converge on a resolution. Here the convergence point is Liberation. Reviewers who sat through 159 minutes without being bored were crediting this rhythm.
Then look at the spaces. The staging keeps setting the closed room against the open field. On one side are the map rooms and Churchill's war room, rebuilt from scratch at Bry-sur-Marne. On the other is the desert battle of Ksar Ghilane, shot on real ground in Morocco. Deleuze describes the large form as breathing between the huge milieu and the taut line of action, which he calls a respiration-space. The real question is which space holds the battle. Leclerc can win the desert. De Gaulle fights in the rooms, and what he fights for there is recognition, not ground.
That brings in a third concept, the relation-image. In this kind of image, meaning lives less in what a character does than in the relations between people, relations the film asks us to hold in mind. De Gaulle's power exists only as a relation: will Churchill, Roosevelt and Giraud say yes to him? Casting Thierry Lhermitte, a comic institution in French cinema, against type as Giraud makes the rivalry feel like a contest between two ways of being believed.
In film theory, the shoot on real Parisian landmarks (the Étoile, the Panthéon, the Gare de l'Est) places the film in André Bazin's tradition of trust in the camera's bond with an actual place. The monuments give the public scenes a documentary weight. Baudry is also open about his method: de Gaulle's real words are kept intact in the major speeches, and he takes liberties elsewhere. That is the classical contract, films don't lie, and the film keeps it carefully. The subject, though, is a man for whom truth was something you make by saying it. The film never resolves that rub, and it shouldn't.
The lineage is close and specific. Quai d'Orsay (2013), Tavernier's film of Baudry's own graphic novel, gave him the corridor-and-cabinet drama of French statecraft. His debut Le Chant du loup (2019) gave him a way of staging protocol, listening and decisions under pressure, and that carries straight into the negotiation scenes. Diplomatie (2014) showed that two men in one room arguing over the fate of Paris could be suspense. Darkest Hour (2017) is the Churchill companion piece, all cabinet-room rhetoric. The Queen (2006) supplied the model of high politics played with restraint rather than impersonation, which is the key to Abkarian's de Gaulle. And the more conventionally patriotic De Gaulle (2020) is the register Baudry defines himself against. It is too soon to say what this film will seed.
Its significance may be this. The French heritage epic, at a scale rarely tried at home and whose two parts drew more than five million admissions, moved its drama away from reconstruction and into recognition. It is a film about how a nation gets spoken into being. When you watch it, listen to the voice and watch the rooms. In every scene, ask who has to say yes.
Concepts in play
- the forger (le faussaire) — De Gaulle's self-authorization as the voice of a defeated nation (set up in Part 1). Liberté covers 1942–45, when that declared truth has to become fact against Giraud, Churchill and Roosevelt.
- fabulation / story-telling — The subtitle J'écris ton nom quotes Éluard's 1942 'Liberté': a nation's name written back into existence. The radio addresses, condensed into one scene, speak a people into being.
- the people are missing — A France divided between London, Algiers, Washington diplomacy and the internal Resistance (Jean Moulin) has to be summoned before it can be shown. The modern-cinema idea is used here against a classical form.
- action-image, large form — Baudry's stated aim of an adventure film's forward drive. The global war situation presses on the hero until Liberation transforms it.
- American organic montage — Systematic alternation of desert and naval battles with ego clashes in London, Algiers and Washington. Parallel lines (Moulin, Leclerc, de Gaulle) converge on Liberation.
- respiration-space — The staging opposes the confined room (map rooms, Churchill's war room rebuilt at Bry-sur-Marne) and the open field (the Ksar Ghilane desert battle shot in Morocco).
- relation-image (mental image) — De Gaulle's legitimacy exists only as a relation others hold: the power struggle with Giraud and the friction with Churchill and Roosevelt, with recognition as the stake.