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Even at the best of times, Charles de Gaulle is a historical figure that one can’t avoid in France. More than 3000 towns and villages across the country honour him with a street name. When Paris built the world’s most impossible international airport, there was only one name they could give it. And inevitably, France’s nuclear aircraft carrier bears the name of the man his military school classmates called “The Great Asparagus“.

This week France marks the 70th anniversary of “The Appeal of 18th June 1940“, and so Charles de Gaulle is even more omnipresent than usual – on TV, in newly-minted books, and on metro walls.

A few years ago, I visited the (now closed) Charles de Gaulle Museum in Bayeux, Normandy, and described the exhibitions as “creepy and obsessive”. Now, having lived in France a little while, I’ve come to understand a little better the influence that “le connétable” still exerts over the French nation and its sense of itself.  The obsession is certainly there, but perhaps it’s less creepy than simply necessary…

Whether you like it or not, many aspects of Charles de Gaulle’s “conception of France” form the backbone of the French nation as it enters the 21st Century: strongly centralised government, broad state involvement in the economy and French exceptionalism in foreign policy. For better or worse, every French President that followed him has  had to work within a political system largely conceived by de Gaulle when he founded the 5th Republic in extremis in 1958.

The event being commemorated this week, De Gaulle’s Appeal of the 18th of June, arguably marked the birth of modern France. The speech made by de Gaulle on the BBC that day in 1940 effectively created the Free French forces, and asserted that the legitimate power of the republic now lay with those resisting occupation, rather than with the collaborationist government headed by Pétain.

But in terms of re-establishing the French nation-state, de Gaulle’s stubborness in the face of his British and American allies was just as important as his fight against the Nazis.

Churchill and Roosevelt were constantly annoyed and bemused by de Gaulle’s insistence that France sit at the table of “great powers”, and Anglo-Saxon incomprehension of the monomaniac de Gaulle continued well after the war. In 1964, the General was famously portrayed as a Dalek in a cartoon in the Daily Mail.

Key to de Gaulle’s plan for the recuperation of post-war France was his insistence on establishing a national legend of  Resistance.  This week I visited Mont Valérien on the outskirts of Paris, site of the monument built by de Gaulle to the heroes of WW2, the Mémorial de la France Combattante. It was extraordinary to me to see how a monument that commemorates France’s triumph over fascism could look so, well, fascist…

But while De Gaulle still inspires awe, argument and occasionally derision in France today, there are some who are not scared to paint the Great Leader in a satirical light. Jean-Yves Ferri’s De Gaulle à la Plage imagines a cartoon Charles de Gaulle and his family on holiday at the beach in 1956, illustrated in hilarious and affectionate detail.

In some ways, de Gaulle has become immortal like Abraham Lincoln or Oliver Cromwell, a character who has become historical shorthand for a certain time period and a certain view of the world. Whether speaking on the radio from wartime London, cryptically addressing Algerian colonists with his Je vous ai compris speech, or lying under a sun umbrella on a beach in Brittany, Charles de Gaulle is going to be haunting imaginations for a long time yet.

At the end of the late screening of Inglourious Basterds on Wednesday night, the cinema erupted into applause. Now, maybe it’s a strange French custom that I hadn’t come across before, or perhaps the room happened to be full of rabid mordus de Tarantino that evening. But quite simply, the film didn’t deserve it.

Diane Kruger contemplates the flammable possibilities of nitrate filmstock

First of all, I’m not going to criticise Inglourious Basterds for being ahistorical.  The film is set in a fairy tale world that happens to bear a very passing resemblence to occupied France. It’s a little like watching Hogans Heroes and ‘Allo ‘Allo simultaneously, but with gruesome screen violence added in. I can accept this -because  if you’re incapable of suspending disbelief during a Tarantino flick, then don’t bother watching.

But Inglourious Basterds simply makes very little sense as a story. Tarantino is a master of slick and innovative narrative. But this film shambles along in overly long and occasionally irrelevant episodes, linked by massive leaps of logic that are neither explained nor plausible (yes, you can place your story inside an ultraviolent comic-book, but the story still needs to fit together).

Brad Pitt should be scalped for his performance, although the script gives him very little to work with. In fact, the script is mostly lumpen, although there is some post-modern fun to be had with  dialogue that transitions glibly between German, English and French (and occasionally Italian – providing Pitt’s only golden moment).

There some bright spots – a couple of scenes remind us of the tension and black humour of which Tarantino is capable. And the show is stolen by the European actors – Christoph Waltz struts around as a zealous and slightly camp jew-hunting Nazi, and Mélanie “Standing In for Uma” Laurent plays a convincing French-Jewish maiden bent on revenge.

War Films 101: A British officer in a German uniform is just asking for trouble…

Mr Tarantino is lumbered with a reputation based on his classic early films,  setting a high standard that is hard to live up to.  He is a genius – growing up in the 90s, I had to sneak in underage to see Pulp Fiction, the one totemic film of my teenagehood. And I had a Reservoir Dogs poster on my bedroom wall for many years (thanks Cameron!).

With Inglourious Basterds, Tarantino may have been trying to make a grand statement about cinema, fiction and history (the climactic scene certainly suggests so, as does Philip French). Tarantino doesn’t completely fail, but most of the time it seems like he’s just made an occasionally diverting film full of silly accents.

Yeah, you see, I told you so…