Odysseus 1, De Gaulle 3
by Richard Pooley
If you haven’t seen The Odyssey, don’t bother. What could have been a great film about the cunning, duplicitous, brave Odysseus (Matt Damon) and his circuitous ten-year journey back home into the arms of his faithful Penelope, is an occasionally enjoyable but mostly tedious series of run-ins with various nasties – Cyclops, Circe, the occupants of Hades, the Sirens, Scylla and Charybdis etc. None of the wit and humour of the original story. No sex (his seven years of lust with Calypso is seven minutes of Mediterranean beach-wandering and homesickness with a well-draped Charlize Theron). And no clear insight into why Odysseus persuaded so many men to follow him for so long when he was so obviously a huge risk to their health and well-being. Dear reader: they all died.
No, the film to see is the five-hour-long La Bataille de Gaulle. This is actually two films with, irritatingly, two titles per film – L’âge de fer (The Iron Age) in France and De Gaulle: Résistance in the UK, and J’écris ton nom (I write my name) in France and De Gaulle: Liberté in the UK. Yes, both are about Charles de Gaulle during the Second World War. De Gaulle: Liberté won’t be released in the UK for another ten days. I have only seen De Gaulle: Résistance. And guess where I will be in a week: France; both films showed in our French village’s cinema at the end of August. Merde!
The critics say the second film is even better than the first. I must see it. Five million French already have. Not many went at first; so few that French media began to claim with relish that this expensive Hollywood-style blockbuster, based on a biography written by a Brit* and directed by a French ex-diplomat (Antonin Baudry), would be a financial disaster. But then word of mouth ushered people inside. And when the first of the summer heatwaves hit France, cinemas’ air-con drew in more.
A high proportion are young French who learned at school a different history of wartime France to that taught to many of their parents and all their grandparents. Not the post-war fiction of brave resistance by many and collaboration with the Germans by a few, but instead the collaboration of a significant minority, the brave but late resistance by opposing political factions within France, and the resentful acquiescence by most in German occupation and indirect rule via the Vichy regime. These two films don’t dispute this newer, truer history but they should make it more palatable to the French. And comprehensible. The German invasion was so swift, so overwhelming, no other people facing the same situation would have reacted differently. And many French did resist, even if such resistance was in tiny ways and almost always futile.
The films also should make the French, whatever their political persuasion, proud of the extraordinary man who insisted that he, and he alone, spoke for them and their country. He was the equal of Winston Churchill, Franklin Roosevelt and Joseph Stalin. What I had not known before was that only Churchill of these three came to understand and admire De Gaulle, and that in turn the French general had a high regard for the British prime minister. There is a delightful scene in the cabinet room of 10 Downing Street where Churchill (played brilliantly by Simon Russell Beale) and De Gaulle (another Simon, Abkarian; what a performance!) spar with each other in French. We all knew that Churchill had a sense of humour; but aloof De Gaulle too? Yet my history teachers and my parents told me that Churchill, along with Roosevelt and the Allied military high command (but not Eisenhower), regarded De Gaulle as an irritant and a joke. To start with he was. How De Gaulle changed this view of him is what makes this film so special.
What the film also makes clear is that De Gaulle saw better than anyone, especially the British, that in the post-war world, the US Americans would try to make European countries their vassals. From the very beginning of his exile in London he showed that he was not just fighting for French independence from the Germans, he was fighting for post-war French sovereignty. How his words must resonate now with the French and the rest of us Europeans. How truly independent are European countries today when we are so dependent on the USA for our defence and their technology?
If you want to understand what true leadership is, you should see De Gaulle: Résistance and Liberté. Many people on this planet are called leaders but few of them actually lead. They are, at best, managers. This is not a criticism. The world has a vast number of managers and desperately needs competent ones. The world has only a few leaders and needs even fewer.
To be a leader in any field you must have followers. These are people who will do what the leader wants and support whatever he or she says because they believe in him or her. Their followship is driven by love, not by logic. This is what makes so many leaders dangerous. Love them or loathe them Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin are unquestionably leaders. And consequential ones. Both are changing our lives. Jo Biden and Leonid Brezhnev were more managers than leaders and not very competent ones at that. Neither changed our lives. You have already forgotten Brezhnev and only remember Biden because his refusal to step down early enough made Trump’s resurrection inevitable.
De Gaulle had the one trait all true leaders share: deep and unshakeable self-belief. Often, as in his case, this leads to arrogance and a haughty demeanour. He was not interested in pleasing people or wished to be loved. This made him enemies and initially left him isolated from those who would come to be his closest aides. It was the self-belief and the clarity of vision and mission which made people turn from sceptics to believers.
My training company could have made a lot of money if we had gone into the lucrative field of running Leadership Courses. Many of our business clients asked us to do so. We refused for the same reason that we didn’t run Diversity Courses: they were bogus and could not achieve what our clients wanted them to achieve.
I’m old school: true leaders are made, not born; people are hard-wired to be prejudiced. In my company we ran communication skills courses around the world for managers, many of whom had ‘leader’ or 'chief' in their title. These managers often became better orators, writers, teambuilders and negotiators as a result. But they remained managers. Similarly, by teaching business people how colleagues, partners, suppliers and customers from different cultures see and navigate the world, I and my fellow trainers helped our cross-cultural course participants become more successful international managers. If the facts they learned and skills they picked up about, say, doing business with the Japanese made them a little less prejudiced against the Japanese, that was a good and satisfying by-product.
There are times when people have to become temporary leaders - the manager in a company department persuading his team to accept a policy or decision they strongly disagree with, the sergeant in a battle urging his platoon forward (or back), the mother when her children are in danger. They will be followed and sometimes they lead well, sometimes not. There are several examples of this in De Gaulle: Résistance: ordinary people leading others out of danger…or into it.
But only one Frenchman in the film, General Marie-Pierre Koenig, one of De Gaulle’s early disciples, comes close to the leadership exhibited by De Gaulle. Just as the battle to take Troy is the most absorbing part of The Odyssey, the depiction of the Battle of Bir Hakeim in Libya in 1942 is the most riveting part of De Gaulle: Résistance. Koenig and his 1st Free French Brigade of some 3,700 men (and one British woman, Susan Travers, Koenig’s driver and lover**) held out for two weeks and two days against a force of 37,000-45,000 led by Erwin Rommel. What’s more, in the final retreat Koenig led two-thirds of his force to relative safety – the British lines. Only about a tenth of his men were French. The core of the brigade were the French Foreign Legion, many of them German refugees (who, if captured, Hitler had ordered to be killed). Most of his troops were from the French African empire, which De Gaulle had through subterfuge and his personal presence in Chad and Congo in 1940, shifted from supporting the Vichy government of General Philippe Pétain to joining the Allies against Germany. Bir Hakeim held up Rommel’s forces for long enough to change the course of the North African campaign. And it made the Allies realise that De Gaulle and his Free French, now called by Churchill the Fighting French, were a major asset.
Odysseus was a leader, no question. He was a crafty tactician: the Trojan Horse was his idea (deliberately built so big that the Trojans had to break down part of their defensive wall to get it in, a crucial detail missed in the film). But having spent ten years fighting a war he himself realised was not worth the victory, he spent another ten travelling around much of the eastern Mediterranean trying to get home. So how effective a leader was he?
De Gaulle was a leader too and not a fictional one. He was a great tactician but a greater strategist. Unlike Odysseus he fled from his country, having lost the battle he’d taken part in (though his contribution was one of the few minor victories in the overall defeat). He was alone in London, claiming to represent the French, and ridiculed for saying that he embodied France. His wanderings took him from London to French West and Central Africa, and finally Algiers. Yet somehow after four years of exile he was leading his victorious Fighting French forces into Paris. The film’s portrayal of him goes a long way to explain that ‘somehow’.
*Julian Jackson: A Certain Idea of France: The Life of Charles de Gaulle
**Please will someone make a film of this extraordinary woman. She waited until 2000, three years before her death at 94 and when all her significant contemporaries had died, before she wrote her autobiography: Tomorrow to Be Brave: A Memoir of the Only Woman Ever to Serve in the French Foreign Legion.
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