What the new De Gaulle film leaves out on how WWII ended for eastern Europe
by https://euobserver.com/author/edward-lucas/ · EUobserverThe new biopic depicts the heroic resistance of 1st Free French Brigade at the Battle of Bir Hakeim (Source: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/fe/Free_French_Foreign_Legionnairs.jpg?utm_source=en.wikipedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=original)
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By Edward Lucas,
London
,
The new biopic about the wartime leadership of general Charles de Gaulle is a must-watch. The two-part epic depicts the transformation of France’s fortunes from defeat and collaboration to victory and sovereignty, exemplified by de Gaulle.
He arrives in London with nothing but moral authority and self-belief, and — if this is a plot spoiler I apologise — returns home in triumph as his country’s leader and liberator, albeit with a little help from the British, Americans, and others.
The film, a box-office record-breaker in France, has many virtues, chiefly the impeccable acting of Simon Abkarian in the title role, and Simon Russell Beale as Churchill (speaking admirably understandable, if accented, French). But other aspects of the story hit me the hardest.
One was the all-too-topical depiction of the United States: vital for victory, yet misguided, sometimes even perfidious. In the cartoonish, goodies-and-baddies version of wartime history, few remember that US president Franklin Roosevelt did not back de Gaulle and his “Free French”.
Following the fall of France in 1940, the administration in Washington established full diplomatic relations with the collaborationist Vichy regime, regarding de Gaulle as an authoritarian pretender, and moreover militarily insignificant. Later, with the Nazis in retreat, the US planned to divide up post-war France and administer most of it as a colony: the place was too important to be run by the French.
The film simplifies the more complicated real-life story (de Gaulle made mistakes too), but it depicts the outlines vividly and accurately: a much-needed revision. It also touches on the shameful treatment, at US insistence, of French African soldiers. Their presence offended entrenched principles of racial segregation. These warriors were banned from the Paris liberation parade, also at American behest, for fear of tainting the newsreel pictures. This episode is not shown in the film.
Other untold stories lie further east, with equally poignant echoes today. I watched the film with a Czech friend: its thrilling, joyous denouement, with the uprising in Paris, and the arrival of the longed-for liberators, contrasts painfully with the events in her capital city in May 1945. There was an uprising in Prague too, but the Americans (only 80km away) let the Soviets march in. Warsaw, destroyed in the 1944 uprising, fared even worse.
Further off-stage are the tragic, heroic events in Tallinn in that year, when Otto Tief’s government briefly tried to restore Estonia’s independence as the Germans fled. Like the Latvian Central Council under Pauls Kalniņš, it was savagely ended by Soviet occupation.
The red stain of domestic communism leaves only the mildest tint in the de Gaulle film. Die-hard French anti-fascists were flummoxed by the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact. Moscow-loyal communists obediently sabotaged their country’s war effort in 1939-40. After 1941, the same people became tenacious anti-Nazis, while ruthlessly sidelining (or worse) their non-communist rivals for post-war power.
These mostly untold stories do not detract from Antonin Baudry’s film, and from its most powerful message: that it is worth fighting on against seemingly overwhelming odds.
Watching de Gaulle fretting in his cramped hotel room, waiting for the telephone to ring, reminded me of east European émigré organisations in the depths of the cold war: a life of dusty premises, futility at best, mockery at worst, abundant backbiting and suspicion.
Who took the Polish government-in-exile seriously? Or the Estonian consulate-general in New York, or the Lithuanian embassy in the Vatican, or the Latvian one in Washington? Or the Czechoslovak émigré publication Svědectví in Paris?
De Gaulle had to wait only two years for relevance, and two more for vindication. These exiled leaders had to wait for decades. But they triumphed too.
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The new biopic depicts the heroic resistance of 1st Free French Brigade at the Battle of Bir Hakeim (Source: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/fe/Free_French_Foreign_Legionnairs.jpg?utm_source=en.wikipedia.org&utm_campaign=imageinfo&utm_content=original)
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Author Bio
Edward Lucas is a former senior editor at The Economist, founder and director of the Baltic International Security Centre think-tank, and a regular writer on defence, security and espionage for The Times and Foreign Policy. He is the author of The New Cold War (2008) and Deception (2011).
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