When a mysterious poster showing a sepia photograph of a pre-first World War teenager with the caption "Celui qui a dit non" ("The Man Who Said No") appeared in the Paris metro last January, few recognised the young Charles de Gaulle. The large ears and nose might have given him away, but the soft look in the eyes was misleading, out of character with the man who would be wounded three times in the coming conflagration, who would be captured at Verdun and try four times to escape from German prison camps.
Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, the young French officer warned his heedless superiors of the need to modernise the army. When war with Germany broke out again in 1939, he fought bravely before fleeing to London in the June 1940 debacle. There, from a BBC studio on June 18th, 1940, Gen de Gaulle made his famous call to the French resistance. "France has lost a battle, but France has not lost the war!" he said. "Nothing is lost, because this war is a world war. In the free world there are immense forces who have not yet entered battle. One day, these forces will crush the enemy. On that day, France must be present at the victory. Then she will regain her freedom and her grandeur . . ."
Despite his conviction, de Gaulle later admitted that he felt "alone and without protection, like a man at the edge of an ocean saying he will swim across it". On June 28th, the British government recognised him as "leader of the Free French". Four years later, he would walk triumphant down the Champs-Elysees, cheered by a million French people.
He remains the uncontested Great Frenchman of the century, the man without whom modern France could not have recovered from the humiliation of the second World War, would not have gained a seat on the UN Security Council, would not have become a nuclear power.
The sepia poster of the young de Gaulle in the metro last winter was the opening shot - le teasing in French advertising parlance - in a clever publicity campaign for a megaproduction about de Gaulle's 1940-1945 war years. Ten days later, the anonymous portrait was replaced by the instantly recognisable 1943 photo of the general in battledress with his gold embroidered cap, along with booking details for the French impresario Robert Hossein's production.
Nine months of publicity for The Man Who Said No have sparked the biggest revival of de Gaulle nostalgia since the 100th anniversary of his birth in 1990. A new edition of the general's war memoirs has appeared, and French media have used the Hossein show as a pretext for dozens of articles and programmes on his legacy. More than 200,000 tickets for the play were sold before it opened at the 3,700-seat Paris Palais des Congres last night. President Jacques Chirac is seeing it twice. The de Gaulle family - which for the first time authorised use of the Great Man's memoirs on stage - insisted on paying for its 250 tickets. Robert Hossein already entered the Guinness Book of Records for the success of his 1983 production Jesus was his Name. After Jesus, de Gaulle?
Robert Hossein calls de Gaulle "an unknown man who said No - no to defeat, no to cowardice, no to giving up and accepting the enslavement of his country". But the origin of the title for France's most expensive ever theatre production - 40 million French francs, (£4.81 million) - was more prosaic. Hossein - who co-starred with Brigitte Bardot and Sophia Loren in his earlier life as an actor - remembered the Italian star telling him, "It took me 40 years to learn to say No."
The French are still divided about de Gaulle's rule after he returned to office in 1958, but the liberation of France from Nazi Germany is one of the few historical moments upon which they all agree. Hence no one objected when the city of Paris erected a 22-metre high cross of Lorraine - de Gaulle's wartime symbol recalling Joan of Arc - outside the Palais des Congres. The play has been financed by the French billionaire Francois Pinault, who is a close friend of the Gaullist President Chirac. The Paris town hall is also run by Chirac's RPR party. Yet even socialists on the city council say "the values of the liberation of Paris" are not being exploited for partisan politics.
"Today, everybody is a Gaullist," the French journalist Michele Stouvenot said in a recent interview with Robert Hossein. "Of course," he responded. "With the Kosovo war, NATO, you can't help wondering `what would the Great Man have said?' Now is a time for nostalgia, for dreams of grandeur and integrity. A man who stuck his own stamps on every letter he sent - it makes people think."
Despite his vanity and arrogance, de Gaulle was a lucid and moral leader who went against the then politically correct adoration of the collaborationist Marechal Philippe Petain. At a time when French politicians flip-flop with every opinion poll, when corruption scandals have tainted every political party, there is a thirst for heroes who say No. For Robert Hossein, the researchers of Amnesty International, the "French Doctors" of MSF and MDM who help the victims of war and natural disasters, "people who say No to fate, to disease, to poverty, to torture, to hunger," are the present-day equivalent of Charles de Gaulle.
The Man Who Said No promises to be as extravagant as hundreds of earlier Hossein productions, ranging from the first musical of Les Miserables to the plays of Jean-Paul Sartre. It includes a Spielberg-like landing on the beaches of Normandy, the sinking of the French fleet at Mers el-Kebir and the executions of 27 members of the French resistance. Interaction between the audience and the stage is a Hossein trademark. In the de Gaulle epic, bowler-hatted, pin-stripe-suited actors portraying members of the British House of Commons jeer Churchill from the auditorium.