"The flame of French resistance must not be extinguished and will not be extinguished."
On June 18, 1940, shortly after Paris fell to the Nazis, a French army officer who had fled to London appealed over BBC radio for the French people to rally and fight on. It was the historic speech by former President Charles de Gaulle that would later be recorded as the starting point of the French Resistance. Almost no one heard it at the time, when he was all but unknown.
These days, de Gaulle is "hot" in France. The reason is the unexpected box-office success of the two-part film "De Gaulle's Battles," based on a biography written by a British author. Covering his activities from 1940, when de Gaulle founded the Free France government-in-exile, to the liberation of France in 1944, the film looked headed for a commercial failure in early June, when the first installment opened to weak numbers. But word of mouth spread among audiences who came to theaters to escape a heat wave, and the film belatedly took the box office by storm. It has surpassed 5 million admissions — the benchmark for a major hit in France — and remains in theaters.
The renewed attention to a figure every French citizen already knows owes much to the quality of a film that recasts de Gaulle's human side, but many analysts also say France's current predicament has stirred nostalgia for him. With a presidential election set for next April, they say, a political landscape split into extremes and a diplomatic reality shaped by Washington have made de Gaulle's leadership — his politics of unity and his drive for independence — a source of comfort for the French public. In fact, de Gaulle, called the father of the nation in France, is a standard repertoire summoned to the political stage whenever elections come around. Even now, figures far removed from Gaullism, including lawmaker Marine Le Pen of the far-right National Rally (RN) and leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon of the far-left La France Insoumise (LFI), are each claiming to be de Gaulle's heir as they court voters with next year's election in mind.
France's political reality — still clinging to de Gaulle's aura more than 50 years after his death — looks bleak, but South Korea's situation is no better. As politics of division deepens here, where should we look for leadership that unites?
