De Gaulle as Don Quixote: Antonin Baudry’s Portrait of the General Who Secured France’s Freedom and Future

A fact that makes the film particularly compelling is its casting: Simon Abkarian takes the role of the General, aided by Simon Russell Beale as Winston Churchill, Florian Lesieur as the young resistor Fernand Bonnier de La Chapelle, Benoît Magimel as General Pierre Kœnig, and Mathieu Kassovitz as Admiral François Darlan. The cast also includes Anamaria Vartolomei, Niels Schneider, Félix Kysyl, Karim Leklou, Thierry Lhermitte and Campbell Scott, who portrays Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Premiered out of competition at the Cannes Film Festival 2026, De Gaulle – Part One: Resistance was released in France on June 3, followed on June 26 by the second chapter, De Gaulle – Part Two: Freedom (La Bataille de Gaulle: J’écris ton nom), reaching over five million theatergoers in total. The critical reception was also positive, particularly for its ability to blend historical reconstruction, spectacle, and political tension. In Italy both chapters will be distributed by Movies Inspired, but no release date has yet been announced.

On the occasion of the Rome presentation we met Antonin Baudry, who, before turning to cinema and debuting with Wolf Call – Menace on the High Seas (2019), spent thirteen years in the French diplomacy. That experience deeply influenced his way of telling power relations, the contradictions of politics, and above all the people who, often unknowingly, end up changing the course of history.

The De Gaulle Everyone Considered Crazy

For Antonin Baudry, the interest lay not in portraying the great statesman everyone knows, but in the man who in 1940 seemed to have completely lost touch with reality. “When he arrived in London, everyone thought he was crazy. The Britons and the French who met him kept diaries saying that he was right, that they shared what he asserted, but that it was impossible to follow him because he was too crazy.”
The director remained fascinated by the distance between the historical image of the general and the account given by contemporaries. De Gaulle appeared as a figure from another era, almost medieval, unable to answer the most immediate questions without resorting to arguments spanning centuries of history. And yet, that stubbornness would change the fate of France. “There are not many examples of a man who leaves his country, fights against his own government because he considers it immoral, and practically creates a new state, Free France. He had no army, he had no one. Everyone wondered what he was talking about.”

What makes the character even more unusual is his absolute impermeability to change. Baudry notes that in Hollywood cinema the hero generally undergoes a transformation, whereas De Gaulle remains faithful to his beliefs from beginning to end. He does not seek to seduce or convince others: he simply says what he thinks. A character the director compares to Don Quixote, for his chivalrous dimension, rejection of reality, and obsession with grandeur. “There is something profoundly French in all this”, observes Baudry, who finds in the general a figure both comic and tragic at once.

The comparison with the Cervantes character goes beyond irony. Don Quixote is destined for a sad ending when he is forced to abandon his dream, while De Gaulle achieves the seemingly impossible feat of shaping reality without renouncing his beliefs. “It’s a story that makes me laugh and cry at the same time”, the director explains, convinced that irony and patriotism are not necessarily at odds. One can deeply believe in something and, at the same time, be capable of distance. Indeed, sometimes being able to laugh at one’s convictions means believing in them even more.

The Discovery of Fernand and the Role of Youth in the Resistance

One of the film’s most interesting elements is the choice to pair the figure of the general with that of some young resistors, capable of giving the narrative an emotional and generational dimension. The presence of Fernand Bonnier de La Chapelle arose during the long research work conducted by Baudry and his wife and co-screenwriter Bérénice Vila. The two spent more than a year studying documents and testimonies, consulting historians to acquire a deep knowledge of the events before granting themselves the freedom necessary for cinematic writing.
“It had become a project for us as a couple. We talked about it constantly, at breakfast and in the evening. We have two children and we joked that De Gaulle had become our third child.”

The turning point came when Vila heard on the French radio the reading of a letter written by a young man to his father. It was a letter from Fernand. “When I heard it I started crying. We looked at each other and understood that that letter had to be included in the film.” From that moment the two screenwriters delved into the boy’s story, discovering a character to whom historiography had allotted relatively little space, yet who played a decisive role in a highly delicate phase of France’s Free history. Baudry recalls how, after the Allied landings in North Africa, the Americans had chosen to support François Darlan, a figure tied to the Vichy regime. A decision that seemed to exclude De Gaulle from the new political balance. Fernand, outraged at the possibility that a man compromised with collaboration could represent the fighting France, decided to act. “This man changed the course of history. I liked the idea that at the beginning of the film the audience would wonder why we were following that boy, only to discover how important he was.”

The director also wanted to recount the student demonstration of 11 November 1940 in Paris, when thousands of youths challenged the Nazi occupation and reached the area of the Arc de Triomphe. Many had organized the protest spontaneously, unaware that other students were doing the same thing. “For a couple of hours they had the feeling of having liberated a tiny part of France. I heard the testimonies of those kids when they were old. They described that day as the most important of their lives. It was moving, and it had never been shown in cinema.”

A Historical Film Told Like a Thriller

Despite the breadth of reconstruction, De Gaulle does not follow the traditional codes of the biographical film. Narrative tension, war sequences, and political confrontations bring the story close to a thriller, while the perspective remains firmly anchored to the characters. Baudry explains that he aimed to tell the events without the advantage of the historical knowledge that contemporary viewers bring. The protagonists do not know what will happen, they do not know the war’s outcome, and they are often convinced they are doomed. “I wanted to show the history from the human point of view of the people who were living it. People who did not know how it would end and who probably thought they would lose. But they kept fighting.”

This choice also influenced the directing and the use of music. Not a soundtrack that automatically evokes the era through recognizable conventions and not a deliberate anachronism, such as inserting rock music into a historical reconstruction. The aim was rather to restitute the present of the characters, their immediate perception of the events. A way to strip history of monumentality and restore to it the uncertainty, fear, and urgency of those who were living it.

Churchill and De Gaulle, an Impossible Alliance Between Irony and Diplomacy

It is in the sequences devoted to the exchanges between Winston Churchill and Charles de Gaulle that Baudry’s diplomatic experience becomes most evident, detailing how he personally witnessed numerous meetings between heads of state, reproducing a balance of political tension, mutual distrust, and humor. “They were always very strange, funny, and at the same time extremely tense situations. As the tension grew, they sometimes became comic, because emotions exploded.”

The director recalls how even the choice of language can become a tool of power. A leader may decide to speak through an interpreter, even while perfectly fluent in the interlocutor’s language, simply to reiterate his position. In Churchill’s case, particularly attentive to words, this diplomatic game can yield unpredictable results. Yet behind the humor lies a fundamental political decision: Churchill chooses to support De Gaulle despite his advisers’ objections, convinced that the general without an army represents more a problem than a resource. “Churchill was leading the only European country that continued to fight against a Germany that seemed to have conquered everything. Everyone told him not to ally with De Gaulle: he was crazy, he could offer nothing and would create trouble with the Vichy government. And yet he chose to support him.”

According to Baudry, that choice reveals a conception of politics profoundly different from American pragmatism. Churchill does not reason solely in terms of power balances or military losses. For him nations possess a soul, and history cannot be reduced to a mere material calculation. The situation becomes paradoxical immediately after the decision to back the French general: “I find it very funny that Churchill, one minute after deciding to support him, nearly begins to regret it, because De Gaulle is intolerable.” Both, the director explains, have their own reasons. Churchill knows that without British support De Gaulle would have had no chance. De Gaulle, for his part, understands that his own weakness prevents any concession. If he began to yield, the Allies would end up taking everything from him.

Hope as a Message to New Generations

The link between the 1940 young resistors and today’s youth is one of the aspects Antonin Baudry considers most important. A parallel that gains particular force as France experiences a fresh wave of protests, which began with student demonstrations and then spread to workers, unions, and movements opposing the cost of living and the deterioration of public services. The protests of October 17 and 24 brought hundreds of thousands of people across the country, while the government of Emmanuel Macron tries to contain a crisis that has brought the relationship between citizens, institutions, and the right to demonstrate back into the spotlight.

In this tense climate, the story of the young people who in 1940 chose to defy the Nazi occupation gains special resonance, though the contexts are profoundly different. Baudry does not seek a direct comparison to current events, but identifies in the younger generations’ ability to reject what they deem unjust a force capable of challenging even the most seemingly established equilibria.
“What these people teach us is that hope matters. Even when there is no reason to keep hoping, one must do so.”

For Baudry, the second teaching concerns the need for a moral compass capable of guiding decisions beyond personal desires and immediate conveniences. “We cannot act solely in function of our desires. We must be capable of asking what is right to do for the people who will come after us.”
It is a message that returns the film to its initial intuition: telling of men and women who decided to act when everything seemed already lost. Not because they knew the future, but because they refused to accept the present. And it is precisely this, for Baudry, the most contemporary strength of De Gaulle: to remember that history is not changed only by great leaders, but also by seemingly insignificant people who, at a decisive moment, choose not to surrender.
Here is the trailer in the original language of De Gaulle – Part One: Resistance.