How much of our political agency have we sacrificed on the altar of imagined constraints? That question has been troubling me since last week, when I stepped out of the glitteringly art deco Grand Rex cinema in Paris. I had just been to see part one of La Bataille de Gaulle, a two-part epic based on British historian Julian Jackson’s extraordinary biography of Charles de Gaulle. Both Jackson and the film, which focuses on the second world war, present the towering French general as a combination of stubbornness, arrogance and genius.

As a mid-ranking two-star general, De Gaulle had little inherent claim to be the face of France in exile. For four years after fleeing to London in June 1940, he imposed himself next to Churchill, and then Roosevelt. He bullied his way in to top-table discussions thanks to an ego the size of a nation state: a nation state he himself would embody fully. “I recreated France from nothing, from being a man alone in a foreign city,” De Gaulle wrote of his time in London. Immodest, yes, but also right.

What De Gaulle did not do when he reached London – practically unaccompanied by anyone to form a government-in-exile with, much less an army – was look at the enormity of the task and resign himself to all the ways in which it was impossible. Instead, he decided that the future could be bent by the sheer obstinacy of his will. This is what it took to rebirth a country – which in turn gave new life to France’s........

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