The future world statesman, in full military uniform, leaps athletically on to the table. Then he reaches up into the ceiling lamp of his hotel room and pulls out a concealed microphone. It has been placed there by his American allies, or perhaps by the perfidious British. Or possibly by both at once. There are a lot of wires. If there is one brief scene which encapsulates the two vast new films about Charles de Gaulle, I think this is it. They recount the astonishing melodrama of the rebirth of France after humiliation and defeat. And they do so through a patriotic epic about the Second World War in which Hitler makes no appearance, FDR is the villain, and Churchill often an American patsy. The hero is the metaphorical and literal (6’5”) giant, General de Gaulle, a man so tall that furniture always seemed too small to him, and so did most other people.
We owe these films to Julian Jackson’s peerless biography of de Gaulle, a book that tears through the mind like a storm. This book (for me at least) revived the forgotten belief that individual human greatness can force open the grimmest, most unassailable fortresses. Read it. See the movies. You will not be sorry.