When the French picture General Charles de Gaulle in their mind’s eye, it is usually striding down the Champs Élysées after the liberation of Paris in 1944.
Now they are being offered a different vision of the man who led the resistance to the Nazis and became the architect of modern France.
The first scene of a biopic of de Gaulle, released this week, shows him making love to Yvonne, his wife, early one morning shortly before the German invasion in 1940. Even for the famously liberal French, the scene — indeed the movie in general, titled De Gaulle — has come as a shock.
Some commentators have welcomed the decision by Gabriel Le Bomin, 52, the director, to focus not only on de