The big-budget biopic La Bataille de Gaulle, which premiered at Cannes in May, has drawn the ire of French historians for liberties it takes with historical record. But Julian Jackson, the British scholar whose biography inspired the film, says some things are more important than the details.
Jackson is Britain's leading authority on Charles de Gaulle and the author of the 2018 biography A Certain Idea of France, which inspired filmmaker Antonin Baudry's film.
When the two men began working together, Jackson's instinct was to reach for a red pen.
"At the beginning I would say, 'oh, that's wrong, that's wrong, that's wrong'," he recalls. "Then I realised that was absurd."
That realisation led to a fruitful collaboration between a history scholar obsessed with the facts and a director aiming to sell tickets.
La Bataille de Gaulle covers the two years from the then-little known General De Gaulle's arrival in London in June 1940 to the assasination of Admiral Darlan in Algiers by a resistance fighter in December 1942.
The sequel J'écris ton nom, which covers from 1943 to the liberation of Paris in 1944, was released on Friday.
Baudry consulted Jackson on every draft of the screenplay. And on every draft, Jackson would object, Baudry would listen carefully – and then do what he wanted anyway.
"It's his film," Jackson says from his home in the south of France, where he spends several months of the year.
"He was keen to know what was right and what was wrong, but would always say in the end, 'you know, I'm making not a documentary, but a film inspired by history. And I have to make it dramatic.' I completely accepted that."
Poetic licence
Some parts of history, such as the war in Syria in 1941, simply don't figure.
And then there are inventions – a fictional Polish plumber who de Gaulle employs to answer his phone while setting up the Free France Forces in London in June 1940 adds a comic touch, for example. But Jackson says there's a serious idea behind this character too.
"His point was to show that this man [whom] we all know in theory was sort of alone... was literally alone. He was in a little bedroom without a desk. It was a way of showing that in a humorous way, which did absolutely no harm because de Gaulle did have a ragbag of followers."
Then there's the fictional Jewish girlfriend of Fernand Bonnier de La Chapelle – the young resistance fighter who shoots Admiral Darlan in Algiers. Jackson says she adds the only significant female presence to what is otherwise an entirely masculine story. Her Jewishness also allows the film to follow the mounting anti-Semitism in Nazi-occupied France.
"She ticks a lot of boxes which need to be ticked," the historian says. "And it does absolutely no harm to anything because she's [played by] a wonderful actress".
Listen to a conversation with Julian Jackson on the Spotlight on France podcast.
'He's not a statue'
Some French historians, however, are less forgiving.
In an interview with current affairs magazine Marianne, Eric Branca – who has written extensively on de Gaulle – said he was "appalled by the liberties taken with historical truth," and the absence of Pétain's right-hand man Pierre Laval.
"I'm dismayed that this film can claim to be based on Julian Jackson's book, which is a very good work by a very good historian".
Olivier Dard, a history professor at the Sorbonne University, told Le Figaro newspaper that the film "glosses over the political dimension of de Gaulle, which is, however, central".
There has also been debate over whether certain events in the film happened in reality.
Arnaud Teyssier, president of the scientific council of the Charles de Gaulle Foundation, disputes a vivid episode in which de Gaulle smashes a chair during a furious confrontation with British prime minister Winston Churchill.
But Jackson is adamant: "The scene with the breaking of the chair is true."
He believes the film gets the Churchill-de Gaulle relationship right.
"It's basically love-hate with Churchill," he says. "Two powerful individuals, both slightly romantic, both sort of inhabited by history."
Where some French critics have bristled at scenes that show de Gaulle as seemingly "doomed to improvisation", Jackson insists this aspect of the film is legitimate.
"What [Baudry is] particularly fascinated by is the slightly 'Don Quixote' side of de Gaulle – the way that de Gaulle was a solitary figure with almost the craziness of genius about him. And that's all absolutely there in my book. It's that side of this man inhabited by this extraordinary vision that really excited the filmmaker. It's not all of de Gaulle, but it's an absolutely legitimate side of de Gaulle."
One of Jackson's fellow historian friends, too, said he was uncomfortable at the way the film seemed to make de Gaulle look ridiculous – with the film including scenes of de Gaulle meeting another general for important talks covered in mud following a crash and refusing an anti-malaria product saying "mosquitos don't bite de Gaulle".
"He wants to show this man is a man," Jackson says. "That things happen to him, and he's not a statue."
'Moral courage'
De Gaulle was nonetheless a towering figure – "the greatest 20th century French political leader, one of the greatest 20th century political leaders in any country," according to Jackson.
That greatness, he says, lies partly in a mixture of "rational intelligence – the ability to analyse a situation with historical depth – combined with a kind of moral courage, a sort of courage which might lead you necessarily to disobey sometimes".
De Gaulle demonstrated both in his 18 June, 1940 speech broadcast on the BBC in which he called on the French to rally around him and his Free France movement and not capitulate to Nazi Germany.
"He said the reason we must not give up is that this will become a world war. France has been defeated, but this isn't the end. It's only the beginning. America will come into the war, America has huge economic resources, the British have their whole empire. Just don't think it's just a French affair.
"And that was what very few other French people saw in 1940. So he had a kind of geopolitical planetary vision of things, which made him capable of seeing beyond the disaster of the moment."
While politicians from across the political spectrum now scramble to claim de Gaulle's legacy, Jackson refuses to read much into this.
"Everybody wants a little piece of de Gaulle nowadays, but it doesn't mean anything. It's just a sort of vague reference to a hero. And it does no harm to link yourself to a hero."
This subject first featured on the Spotlight on France podcast, episode #147.
