Best Allies narrates the meeting between Charles de Gaulle and Winston Churchill in London, from 5 to 7 June 1944. Churchill had to announce to de Gaulle the imminence of the landing of Allied troops in Normandy (Operation Neptune) and convince him to address the French people from the BBC, after Eisenhower's speech.
The exchange is tense. De Gaulle, head of the Provisional Government of the French Republic (created two days earlier in Algiers on the occasion of the same meeting), was furious at having been excluded from military operations. He refused any negotiations with Churchill, the British Prime Minister. But the Allies needed him, both to advance in a country they did not know and to administer the liberated territories. De Gaulle was, according to Eisenhower, the "only authority that resistance groups wish to recognize." Through Anthony Eden (Conservative, Foreign Secretary in Churchill's cabinet) and Pierre Viénot (socialist, ambassador of the Free France to the British Government), the two men tried to reach an agreement: Eisenhower 's call would be broadcast on the BBC in the early morning. De Gaulle will be broadcast at 6 p.m. His text, which had not been submitted to Churchill beforehand, presented him as the sole head of the French Government.
This face-to-face is written by Hervé Bentégeat, journalist and author of essays (especially historical), and directed by Jean-Claude Idée, Franco-Belgian director and playwright, founder in 1989 of the Magasin d'écriture théâtrale (intended to publicize contemporary plays) and with Michel Onfray in 2013, of the Universités Populaires du Théâtre, a network using theatre for popular education purposes. On stage, the roles of Charles de Gaulle, Winston Churchill, Anthony Eden and Pierre Viénot are respectively interpreted by Pascal Racan, Michel de Warzée, Laurent d'Olce and Denis Berner.
The dramaturgy of the show is reminiscent in many ways of that of classical tragedies: the exchange takes place behind closed doors and confronts men of power in a temporality close to reality. During the first part (direct exchange between de Gaulle and Churchill), the duration of the meeting equals the duration of the performance. The change of scenery, which marks the transition to a second part (indirect exchanges transmitted by Eden and Viénot, such as the "intriguing" valets of Molière or Marivaux), also marks a new temporality, more elliptical and fragmented. The plateau is then divided into two distinct spaces; Churchill's cabinet on one side, de Gaulle's on the other. Jean-Claude Idée's aesthetic is realistic: the sets and costumes are period (1944) and the actors imitate the accents, manias, tics and ways of moving of the characters they embody. The video, moreover, appears as a means of projecting archival images and military plans. The director reconstructs history in a documentary, almost scientific way, thus creating for the audience the illusion of a real debate.
Some historical inaccuracies are nevertheless to be raised: social security is not the initiative of General de Gaulle, as the show claims, but of Ambroise Croizat, communist deputy ofthe Fourth Republic . In seeking to remain objective, the show reproduces the mass ideology that makes de Gaulle a humanist hero. "There is no equivalent example today," writes the author in his note of intent, giving some idea that his text is a tribute to these "two great men", forgetting their ambition and megalomania.
In any case, the Best Allies show invites us to reflect on the basis of a state's legitimacy. What is the France of the 40s? Aren't there two France? One free, one occupied? The legitimacy of a state and a government depends on the recognition given to it by other states (take the recent example of Puigdemont and Catalonia). If de Gaulle wants a place on the podium, it is so that the free France is recognized as a state in its own right and that he is recognized as a leader. If the France was liberated by the British without de Gaulle, he would not have had the legitimacy to govern and the country would have been administered by an AMGOT (Allied Military Government of Occupied Territories) military government for two years. By imposing himself before Churchill and Roosevelt, de Gaulle above all rewrote history, making France a resisting power during the war and victorious in the conflict.
The end of the show shows us two men who have achieved their goals, each on their own (both returned to power after a more or less long "crossing of the desert": Churchill in 1951, de Gaulle in 1958). In ego warfare, heroism is always relative.
The show Meilleurs Allies is to be discovered without further delay at the Théâtre du Petit Montparnasse, until Saturday, June 30.
