If They Only Knew

To his followers, Charles de Gaulle was nothing less than "twice the savior of his country," and even today the Gaullists are reluctant to entrust the telling of the precious legend to anyone who might tamper with it. Nobody knows this better than French Film Makers Alain de Sedouy and Andre Harris, who (along with Director Marcel Ophuls) collaborated in 1969 on the superb documentary The Sorrow and the Pity, an exhaustive and exhausting (4 1/2-hour-long) study of a French city under the Nazi Occupation (TIME, March 27, 1972).

Two years ago, they set out to make another mammoth chronicle, this time of the entire De Gaulle era. "We were exasperated by the veil of veneration thrown over him," says De Sedouy. The two soon ran into a Gaullist resistance as stubborn and iron-willed as that of the General himself. De Gaulle's son Philippe refused to see them, telling friends that everything must be done to stop a project that could "only denigrate" his father. The state television network, ORTF, which holds a monopoly on World War II newsreels as well as postwar TV newsclips, refused to loan or sell the moviemakers any footage at all until after De Sedouy and Harris had threatened a lawsuit.

Despite the Gaullist opposition, Franc,ais, Si Vous Saviez (Frenchmen, If You Knew) was finished within 18 months. But even then, the government-appointed censorship board waited for seven weeks before granting it a commercial license. In fact, the license came through only ten days before the beginning of the French elections--too late for the film to have much influence on the voting, but in time to enable the government to refute charges of film censorship.

After that, De Sedouy and Harris were all set to release their picture--except that the country's two principal film distributors, Gaumont and Pathe, reversed an earlier decision and refused to book it. They were afraid, explained one distributor, that the film "would provoke public disorder."

When Franc,ais, Si Vous Saviez finally opened in eight small theaters in Paris last month, it proved to be a prodigious (eight hours), three-part history of modern France from the First World War to the death of Charles de Gaulle. Its characters range from French-Algerian "Secret Army" Colonel Antoine Argoud to Communist Leader Jacques Duclos, from a patriotic old Lorraine grocer to a Gandhi-quoting Algerian nationalist. The two film makers, who describe themselves as non-Communist leftists, use all these characters to document their thesis: that liberte, egalite, fraternite are more rhetoric than fact.

Naturally, Franc,ais, Si Vous Saviez became a center of controversy overnight. The pro-government France-Soir praised it as "exciting" and "excellent," while Historian Franc,ois Furet attacked it as a "monument of crafty demagogy" that sought to turn De Gaulle "from a savior into a scapegoat."

Such a judgment is hardly fair. The film shows many of the General's strengths; the final scene in the cemetery at Colombey-les-Deux-Eglises affectingly portrays the special relationship that existed between De Gaulle and the French people.

And yet the suspicions of the Gaullists were partially justified. As Le Canard Enchaine's film critic Michel Duran wrote: "You come out of the film not very proud to be one of those Frenchmen with a perpetual weakness for military men who offer themselves as a gift to France . . . Frenchmen, if you only knew that you are forever being cuckolded."

What were the film makers trying to prove? "The French are the victims of the sin of self-satisfaction," says De Sedouy. "They believe strongly in the responsibility of others, not in their own." Says Harris: "We hope that the film will upset people, will cause intellectual agitation. Our view of how the French have behaved in the past half-century is pessimistic, but nothing proves that they won't change."

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