In a summer when Americans were preoccupied with a film adaptation of The Odyssey, French people, too, flocked to movie houses to see a great army’s wisest commander blown about the edges of Europe in involuntary exile, on the verge of a triumphant homecoming. The French version, a two-part blockbuster called La Bataille de Gaulle (De Gaulle’s Battle), deals not with Odysseus but with someone only slightly less mythic. Charles de Gaulle (1890–1970) led the resistance against Hitler’s conquest of France, inspired France’s present constitution, served as his country’s president well into the Age of Aquarius, and wrote a half dozen books that stand as literary classics. Director Antonin Baudry focuses on the four years after 1940, when de Gaulle, living in London exile, assembled thousands of rebel soldiers and officers into an army that fought the Nazis in North Africa and Italy, linked that army to several domestic guerrilla resistance movements, liberated Paris with it, and then established a government that allowed Frenchmen—against all odds—to stride into the postwar world as victors rather than collaborators.

Like the Russian writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, de Gaulle would have a fair claim to be considered the greatest man of the 20th century were his virtues not so profoundly specific to his nation. For those who