De Gaulle: Liberté

The second part of Antonin Baudry's De Gaulle reached French cinemas on 26 June 2026, three weeks after the first, completing a diptych that Pathé released as the biggest French production of the year. Both halves are adapted by Baudry and Bérénice Vila from Julian Jackson's biography A Certain Idea of France, and together they follow the general across the war years, from the fall of France towards 1944. The French title borrows its words from Paul Éluard's Resistance poem Liberté.

Simon Abkarian returns as de Gaulle and Simon Russell Beale as Churchill, and the cast widens as the politics do: Niels Schneider plays General Leclerc, Thierry Lhermitte is Henri Giraud, Karim Leklou returns as de Gaulle's secretary Blazej, and Anamaria Vartolomei continues the parallel story of those fighting inside occupied France. The emphasis shifts from the improvisation of the first film to the harder business of holding a movement together — rival claims to lead the French, allies with their own interests, and the costs borne by the clandestine networks. Pierre Cottereau and Giora Bejach share the photography across the diptych, and Théo Cascio takes over the score from Volker Bertelmann.

Audiences rated it even higher than its predecessor, with an IMDb average of 8.0 and more than forty thousand Letterboxd ratings at 3.91. Taken together, the two films are the most ambitious French attempt in years to put the Second World War on screen at the scale Hollywood usually reserves for itself, while keeping the argument about what France was, and who could speak for it, at the centre.