‘The spirit of resistance’: De Gaulle biopic turns into surprise hit for France’s younger viewers

Historians argue box office enthusiasm shows desire for unifying figure as country faces political division On 18 June 1940, Charles de Gaulle, then a little-known army officer, sat in a BBC studio in London and made his famous rallying call for the French to resist the Nazi occupation and its puppet Vichy government. In the eyes of the British prime minister Winston Churchill, De Gaulle was an arrogant, stubborn and defiant thorn in his and the allies’ side, but the Frenchman never stopped believing in the greatness of France and the need for resistance. Now a new two-part biopic, based on a biography of De Gaulle by a British author, has proved to be a surprise summer hit in French cinemas and given the country’s young a new old hero. La Bataille de Gaulle, to be released in UK cinemas on 28 August and 19 September, has drawn an audience of 5 million people since its release in June, rivalling Hollywood blockbusters Spider-Man: Brand New Day and The Odyssey. And not just because cinemas have been air-conditioned refuges from the successive heatwaves. The French historian Alya Aglan, a professor at the Panthéon-Sorbonne university in Paris, and co-author of the bestselling bo