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Among my children’s generation, France seems to have almost zero cultural influence; they don’t watch any French television, they don’t listen to any French music, and I’m not sure many could name a French novelist more recent than Albert Camus. Indeed, very little of what my own children consume comes from continental Europe at all. In contrast, I’d say about 10 per cent of their overseas cultural diet stems from Japan or South Korea, both of which have become global youth culture superpowers despite only having about 23 young people between them. The other 90 per cent, of course, is American: American television, American music and American politics.
I thought about this while watching Resistance, the newly-released Charles de Gaulle biopic, which can realistically show the General inhabiting British elite circles without having to master the language. While the brilliant Simon Russell Beale’s French is apparently just right for Churchill, Anthony Eden (played by Tom Mison) speaks French fluently. Indeed, Eden used French to communicate with Chinese leader Zhou Enlai in the 1950s while trying to negotiate peace in Indochina. (Zhou is the one who famously said of the French Revolution that it was ‘too early to tell’, although he was actually talking about the protests of 1968, not 1789 - it just seemed like the perfect ‘wise old Chinese man’ sort of comment and so was misinterpreted.)
Eden also spoke German, as did de Gaulle, one learning from a governess and the other in a prisoner of war camp, which reflected changing Teutonic approaches to spreading their cultural influence. The General famously had trouble with the English language, though, and in one amusing scene in the film, when asked whether he speaks it, replies with indignation: ‘No, I am French.’
The way that British ministers and military officers converse in French in the film is a reminder of a lost world where it was the language of elites across Europe, a world one can’t help but mourn when one hears the children watching the latest prog drivel produced by Netflix.
