Name: De Gaulle: Liberté
Director: Antonin Baudry
Genre: History, Drama
Released: 2026-06-26T00:00:00+00:00
Duration: 159 min
Cast: Simon Abkarian, Niels Schneider, Thierry Lhermitte, Karim Leklou, Anamaria Vartolomei

A general who spent the first film with no army and a single radio frequency now faces something more treacherous: a country drifting back within reach, and allies who would rather hand it to a man easier to manage. That is the situation Antonin Baudry picks up in De Gaulle: Liberté, the second panel of his diptych, which swaps the claustrophobia of the London exile for the colder question of who gets to govern a nation once other people’s armies have started to free it.

The French subtitle borrows a line from Paul Éluard’s clandestine poem — Liberté, j’écris ton nom, “Liberty, I write your name” — and the theft is really a thesis. Baudry’s film is about the authorship of a word: who signs “liberty” over a recovering country, whose version of the story becomes the official one, and what happens to the people who did the fighting once the accounting begins. His de Gaulle is no longer pleading to be recognised; he is manoeuvring to make himself unavoidable, which turns out to be the less flattering struggle of the two.

Simon Abkarian carries the role over from the first film and adjusts its temperature. The coiled, self-conscious outsider of the exile chapters hardens into a strategist who has learned that being right is not the same as being in charge. The sharpest new piece of casting is Thierry Lhermitte, an actor the French public files under light comedy, as General Henri Giraud — the rival Washington and London would have preferred to install, precisely because he arrived with no political ideas of his own. Handing that part to a reassuring, familiar face is its own argument: the establishment’s candidate is the one who goes down easy, and the film knows it.

Baudry, a former diplomat who turned the Quai d’Orsay into the satire behind The French Minister before directing the submarine thriller The Wolf’s Call, still films statecraft as a sealed-room problem of who to trust and when. But Liberté also asks to be measured against the tradition it joins. It reaches for the moral chill of Jean-Pierre Melville’s Army of Shadows, where resistance is mostly logistics, waiting and dread, and it cannot quite escape the shadow of René Clément’s Is Paris Burning?, the older, star-stuffed account of the Liberation that treated the event as pageant. Where Gabriel Le Bomin’s recent De Gaulle kept the man domestic and the history soft-focused, Baudry insists on the friction — the sense that Free France was improvised by a handful of stubborn, unglamorous people and could have collapsed at any negotiating table.

The risk is precisely the one the first film held at bay. A story that ends in liberation wants to be triumphant, and triumph is where the great-man frame quietly wins. Baudry is honest about the Anglo-American condescension his general had to swallow, and about the palace intrigue that pitted him against Giraud; he is more cautious with the reckoning that arrived alongside victory — the settling of scores, the sidelining of the communist resisters who had done so much of the dying, the mythology de Gaulle himself would spend the rest of his life curating. A picture built around a man convinced of his own destiny is always one reverent close-up away from agreeing with him, and the Liberation supplies the flattering light for it.

Around Abkarian, Baudry crowds the frame with the machinery of Free France and its wary allies. Niels Schneider returns as Leclerc, whose armoured column becomes the film’s engine toward Paris; Karim Leklou and Stéphane Varupenne carry the internal Resistance and its fractious politics; Anamaria Vartolomei’s Livia, an invented character, is again the fictional window onto the circle around the general. On the British side, Simon Russell Beale’s Churchill, Tom Mison’s Anthony Eden and Anthony Calf’s General Spears keep the alliance prickly rather than sentimental. Noémie Schmidt turns up as Susan Travers, the British woman who drove for the Free French at Bir Hakeim — a quiet reminder that the story had many more authors than the one whose name sits on the poster.

Simon Abkarian as Charles de Gaulle in De Gaulle: Liberté (2026) — Simon Abkarian in De Gaulle: Liberté (2026)

Baudry wrote the screenplay again with Bérénice Vila, adapting Julian Jackson’s biography A Certain Idea of France, and Kacey Mottet Klein and Loïc Corbery round out the political and personal circle as the aide Courcel and the politician René Pleven. Pathé produces and distributes, with Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes Cinéma, TF1 Films Production and a long bench of French backers behind it — the industrial apparatus the country keeps in reserve for its self-consciously national event pictures.

De Gaulle: Liberté runs about 159 minutes and opened in French cinemas in the early summer, completing the story De Gaulle: Résistance began. It reaches Irish screens on 11 September and British ones on 18 September; a wider international rollout has yet to be dated. Whether viewers outside France will sit through a two-film life of a man many of them know mainly as a Paris airport is the commercial wager underneath the historical one. But as an argument about who gets to write the word liberty over a country, and at whose expense, Baudry’s second half is the more interesting fight.