De Gaulle: Liberté

De Gaulle: Liberté — released in France as La Bataille de Gaulle — Partie 2 : J'écris ton nom — is the concluding half of Antonin Baudry's two-part epic on Charles de Gaulle, adapted with co-writer Bérénice Vila from Julian Jackson's biography A Certain Idea of France: The Life of Charles de Gaulle. Where the first instalment, L'Âge de fer (internationally Résistance), covered the birth of Free France from London, this part carries the story forward from the North African campaign in Libya through the Landings to the Liberation of Paris.

Simon Abkarian returns as de Gaulle, no longer the isolated voice of a radio broadcast but the contested head of a movement that must be turned into a state. The film's second great figure is General Philippe Leclerc, played by Niels Schneider, whose expanded presence here supplies the movement and momentum: his intransigence and his taste for disobedience rhyme with de Gaulle's own, and his armoured column provides the narrative thread that runs to the capital.

Baudry, returning to directing seven years after Le Chant du loup, treats the material less as a battle chronicle than as a study of legitimacy — how a man with no army, no territory and no mandate persuades allies, rivals and an occupied country that he speaks for France. Critics described this second part as more lyrical than the first, and its title borrows the closing refrain of Paul Éluard's poem Liberté.

Baudry's subject is not victory but legitimacy: the question of who is entitled to speak in the name of a country that has, officially, surrendered. The diptych's structure makes the argument — the first film is iron, refusal and solitude; the second is the slow, costly conversion of that refusal into a recognised nation.

By building the film around Julian Jackson's biographical account rather than around hagiography, and by casting an actor who, in his own words, was torn away from the icon's pedestal in order to be rehumanised, the film insists that the monument was a man: obstinate, difficult, often alone, frequently wrong about people and unshakeable about principle.

The Éluard borrowing in the title carries the final claim. Liberté is a word one writes before one possesses it — on school notebooks, on sand, on ruins. The film proposes that Free France was exactly that: a name written first and made true afterwards, by soldiers like Leclerc who insisted on marching under it.

The film as national reconciliation. One reading takes the Liberation finale at face value: a country divided by defeat is restored to itself, and de Gaulle's obstinacy is retrospectively vindicated. Audiences, whose ratings ran considerably higher than the critics', largely responded to the film in this register.

The project arrived as an event of French industrial cinema as much as a historical film: with a combined budget of some 74 to 85 million euros it ranks among the most expensive French productions ever made, and its release as two theatrical features rather than a series was itself an argument for the big screen at a moment of streaming dominance. The production's insistence on shooting in France — documented by the CNC under the banner 'impossible to shoot anywhere but in France' — gave it an additional patrimonial dimension.

Its lineage is literary and scholarly rather than mythological: by adapting the British historian Julian Jackson's biography, Baudry aligned the film with a revisionist, humanising strain of Gaullian historiography rather than with commemorative tradition. The Éluard citation in the title connects it to the poetic memory of the Occupation, and the emphasis on Leclerc redistributes the legend across more than one figure.

Reception was strong but not unanimous. On AlloCiné the film registered a press average of 3.5 out of 5 across 38 reviews against a markedly warmer spectator score of 4.4 out of 5 — the gap itself became part of the conversation, with several outlets, Écran Large among them, filing sharply negative verdicts while other critics called the second part a remarkable and striking conclusion and the confirmation of a success. Box office followed the usual pattern for a diptych, the first part taking around $19.4 million and the second around $13.8 million.

The gap between the two constituencies is the story: on AlloCiné the film drew a press average of 3.5 out of 5 from 38 reviews against a spectator average of 4.4 out of 5. General audiences embraced it as the payoff the diptych had promised, praising Simon Abkarian's transformation — widely singled out as the film's centre of gravity — the scale and craft of the reconstruction, and the greater emotional openness of this half compared with the austere first part.

Favourable critics called it a remarkable and striking conclusion to an ambitious project, more lyrical than L'Âge de fer, and credited the ensemble for being in harmony with a rich and bold screenplay; the enlarged role of Niels Schneider's Leclerc was frequently cited as what gives the second film its drive.

The dissenting camp was blunt. Écran Large headlined its review as a general debacle, and scepticism generally clustered around the same points: the length and structural demands of a two-part release, the risk of reverence flattening the portrait, and the sense that the historical set pieces sit uneasily with the intimate study underneath. Commercially the second part took around $13.8 million against the first part's $19.4 million, the customary attrition for a sequel-shaped release.

Verdict: a divisive prestige epic that satisfied the public more than the press, carried by its lead performance and by the Leclerc thread that finally gives the diptych forward motion.