“Vive La (Sanitized) Résistance!”

Emmanuel Macron has eight months left as president of France. He can’t stand again, and the political system is basically paralyzed as a result. Polls make it clear that the most probable outcome is the far-right of Marine Le Pen or her deputy Jordan Bardella forming the first near-fascist government since the collaborationist Vichy regime that operated under the German occupation of France from 1940 to 1944.

But a surprising cultural development has taken place over the summer. An ambitious two-part film about Charles De Gaulle’s career as leader of the Free French in the Second World War has become a surprise hit, especially among the young. (Simply called ”De Gaulle” in English, directed by Antonin Baudry.) Although it deals with the Vichy regime and French Nazis, its main aim is to present Gen. De Gaulle as the great French military hero who understood and mobilized the equally heroic French people to save France from Nazi Germany during the war and American domination after it.

Simon Abkarian, the ethnic Armenian actor who plays De Gaulle got a standing ovation at the first public screening. And he deserved it — great in the part, he looks and acts just like the Great General (or the “Tall General” – the French is ambiguous). The French are not really used to seeing the French army presented as a brave and heroic force, but the second part of the five-hour epic manages this, mostly through stirring portrayals of obscure actions in North Africa. With a $90 million budget, it was a very expensive film for Europe, but relatively cheap by Hollywood standards. (This shows in the scenes of the Liberation of Paris.)

But what was missing compared with the film’s main source — the three volumes of De Gaulle’s war memoirs — is the Communist Party.

De Gaulle… feared a post-war communist take-over more than anything.

De Gaulle had two very serious problems with the Communists. First, the most effective part of the French Resistance was the Communist faction. They were financed and supplied by Moscow and were aiming at armed revolution. This was connected with the second big problem, which the general discussed at length in his memoirs: the Communists were well-organized politically at a time when the only other real political organization functioning in France was the collaborationist Vichy regime under Marshal Pétain, who despite being 84 years old, aimed at becoming a fascist leader for France like Franco in Spain, Mussolini in Italy or Hitler in Germany. De Gaulle was confident that Vichy would fall, but feared a post-war communist take-over more than anything, partly because he thought the Americans would occupy France if it looked like this would happen.

His solution was twofold. In 1943, he sent an emissary to the Resistance, a bureaucrat called Jean Moulin (also the subject of a new, nationalist movie), who was tortured and murdered by the Gestapo and is now another national hero, with schools and city squares named after him. The idea was to place all the Resistance groups under Free French command, so that the Communists would have to share a table with groups representing other political parties, trade unions and church groups. But with the Germans on the run after D-Day in June 1944, De Gaulle pulled an amazing series of rabbits out of his brigadier-general’s hat. Although the Americans didn’t see the point of the Free French, and had on the whole preferred to deal with the collaborationist Vichy regime, the French army now swung behind De Gaulle, and Eisenhower and Roosevelt had no choice but to accept him. He decided that the main thing was that the army had to participate in the invasion of Germany itself, a brilliant decision which earned France an otherwise undeserved permanent seat on the Security Council of the United Nations. It also provided an answer to the Communist problem. He said to the Communist leaders: “You have defended France. Now France calls on you again. You are all now officers of the French army.”

This immediately broke up the Communist cells, cut off Moscow’s political, military and financial links with them, and placed them under top generals who were friends of his. Even though this was an official honor for them, any attempt to organize further Communist agitation would have led to a court martial.

It looked as if this year’s demanding two-part film about De Gaulle was going to fail. But then a murderous heatwave hit, and with temperatures hitting 105 degrees, air-conditioned cinemas suddenly looked very attractive. And so did this version of a crucial period of French history, which washed over a generation that wasn’t yet born when De Gaulle died in 1970. It is surprisingly pro-British, but pretty solidly anti-American, and that seems to hit the spot as far as French society is concerned.

Paradoxically, all of this forgetting might help the Left.

De Gaulle’s elaborate maneuvers with the Communists, however, are just left out. Too complicated for an action-based movie? Possibly. But this version of history solves a lot of problems. Defeated in Algeria and then in Indo-China, and with a recent intervention in West Africa failing too, France doesn’t have too much of a stream of glorious military victories to put on TV or in schoolbooks, with the despised Americans taking over the lead in large-scale imperialist adventures. The price for coming up with such a story is forgetting the whole question of the Communists.

After the war, when De Gaulle became president, the Communists reorganized, but no longer formed a real political threat. Armed revolution was no longer on the menu. While the newly-created CIA set up elaborate anti-communist plans and secret organizations in the U.K., Italy, Greece and other places, France was spared, and President De Gaulle kept up his anti-American sentiment until in 1966, he eventually demanded that all American troops should leave France, and also withdrew France from America’s military command in Europe, NATO. He called LBJ a “cowboy” and the USA “the greatest threat to peace in the world.” Meanwhile, through the 1950s and 1960s, the French Communists were constantly present in the National Assembly, played an active part in trade unions and intellectual life, and had an influential daily newspaper, L’Humanité.

It’s easy to see why a new generation might buy into the idea of France as a country of noble and brave anti-Nazi soldiers and Resistance figures. On the one hand, this means forgetting all about any Soviet influence on the Communist Party of their great-grandfathers. But it also means embracing De Gaulle’s anti-Americanism. While they love burgers and fries and Netflix, they also know that they are considered “cheese-eating surrender monkeys.”

Paradoxically, all of this forgetting might help the Left. The act of simply removing the deeply-embedded Communist, pro-Soviet issue from France’s national mythology — the same solution they have found for dealing with the many keen French Nazis in the same period — makes everything much easier.

The young are the key to next year’s election. They overwhelmingly support Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s hard-left France Unbowed and have little interest in the pro-business agenda of Macron and his few remaining allies. If the election was limited to people under 25, France would have a radical socialist president and government. Just don’t mention the Communists.

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