De Gaulle: Résistance is the first of a two-part feature film series that follows Charles de Gaulle through the tumultuous years of the Second World War. The two films produced by Pathé Cinema had a budget of €74 million, making them the most expensive French films of recent years. The writer-director Antonin Baudry has been working on the project for several years. Baudry began his career as a diplomat and was cultural attaché at the French embassy in Washington and then in Madrid for five years. In 2019, he changed direction and directed his first film The Wolf’s Call (Le Chant du loup), an action thriller set on a French submarine. He began developing his de Gaulle project in 2021 and, having raised the necessary finance (by no means a simple feat for a relatively inexperienced director), he started shooting the films in 2023. De Gaulle: Résistance was first shown at the Cannes Film Festival in May 2026, and was released in Europe and the United States this summer. The second part De Gaulle: Liberté is due out in autumn 2026.
The film is based on the book by the British historian Julian Jackson, A Certain Idea of France: the life of Charles de Gaulle. Jackson, a leading authority on 20th-century French history, is Professor at Queen Mary University of London. His book on de Gaulle won the Duff Cooper Prize for non-fiction and is highly regarded in France.
De Gaulle had fought bravely in the First World War and had been captured in the Battle of Verdun. During the 1930s, he became a great advocate of armoured warfare and wrote extensively on the use of tanks in war. He became known as ‘Colonel Motors’ but was denied promotion to high rank because of his ‘cold and lofty attitude’.
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