A very French invasion to remember the fight against Hitler

President Sarkozy will bring 800 countrymen to London today to mark the 70th anniversary of the Resistance

President Nicolas Sarkozy will make a brief, but elaborate, visit to London today to commemorate the 70th anniversary of Charles de Gaulle's historic appeal to a defeated France to continue the fight against Nazism. Mr Sarkozy and his wife, Carla Bruni-Sarkozy, will join up with 800 French veterans and dignitaries who will arrive on a special Eurostar train emblazoned with giant images of Le Général.

The French president will unveil a plaque at the BBC to commemorate the radio appeal on 18 June 1940 – actually a series of broadcasts – in which an obscure colonel and junior defence minister urged, or ordered, France to "keep the flame of liberty alive". Mr Sarkozy will also place wreaths beside statues of De Gaulle and Winston Churchill and honour French and British veterans at a ceremony at the Royal Hospital, Chelsea.

Before flying back to France for further De Gaulle commemorations, Mr Sarkozy and his wife will lunch with David and Samantha Cameron at 10 Downing Street.

Mr Sarkozy is the first French president to travel to London to celebrate the founding act of "Gaullism" and the birth of the Free French movement of the 1939-45 war. President Jacques Chirac, a Gaullist who did more than any other politician to bury Gaullism in the 1970s and 1980s, saw no reason to mark the 60th anniversary in 2000. President De Gaulle himself – by then suspicious of Britain – saw no reason to mark the 20th anniversary when he was head of the French state in 1960, or the 25th anniversary in 1965.

President Sarkozy's decision to stage a series of London ceremonies has delighted the surviving veterans of La France Libre, now mostly in their 90s. They say that the visit will be one of their last opportunities to gather in large numbers. It will also be a "final" opportunity to thank the people of Britain for the open-handed welcome that they were given from 1940 onwards. (The initially small band of "Frenchies", no more than 7,000 strong by the late summer of 1940, were given free travel on the Underground. They often found that their restaurant meals had been paid for by strangers.)

More widely, however, today's ceremonies have aroused some criticism, and suspicion, in France. President Sarkozy has been accused of trying to use De Gaulle's memory as a puncture-kit for his deflated popularity. He has also been accused of trying to revive simplistic myths of French wartime history as part of a campaign to strengthen French contemporary "identity" and create a more positive, "can-do", French self image. Tomorrow, President Sarkozy's former colleague and sworn enemy, Dominique de Villepin, will, pointedly, hold the founding congress of his new, anti-Sarkozy, centre-right, political movement, which claims to represent a rekindling of true "Gaullist" values.

Jean-Pierre Azéma, a historian of the collaborationist Vichy regime and the French Resistance, has accused Mr Sarkozy of "exploiting history and making it into a national novel". Mr Azéma, while recognising De Gaulle's courage and importance, says that few French people had heard of Colonel, or acting-General, De Gaulle in 1940. Relatively few took heed of his BBC radio appeal or the leaflets, signed by De Gaulle, that were dropped in France that summer by the RAF. ("France has lost a battle," the general proclaimed. "It has not lost the war.")

There were many thousands of French troops in London in June 1940, survivors of the Dunkirk beaches and the abortive allied expedition to Norway. They were given the choice of joining De Gaulle or going home. All but a few hundred chose to go home.

In France, the real "man of the moment" in 1940, says Mr Azéma, was Marshal Henri-Philippe Pétain, the "victor" of Verdun in 1916, who was regarded as having somehow saved French honour by agreeing to an armistice with the victorious Germans and a puppet "independent" regime in southern France.

Jean-Pierre Richardot, another French historian of 1940, says that President Sarkozy is in danger of commemorating a "fable" or "two fables". The first, he says, is the "myth" that De Gaulle created the Free French movement, when its true founder was Winston Churchill.

It was the British prime minister, he said, who decided, against the advice of ministerial colleagues, to promote the far-fetched ambitions of a tall, dour, energetic, renegade, 49-year-old French junior minister who claimed, somehow, to represent the true identity and "honour" of France.

"Without Churchill, De Gaulle would have been nothing," Mr Richardot said.

The second fable of 1940, he says, is that France, and the French army, welcomed the armistice and that Marshal Pétain, initially at any rate, acted honourably to diminish French suffering. Most French soldiers and the very powerful French navy would willingly have carried on the fight from North Africa, Mr Richardot says. They were "betrayed" by a de facto coup d'état by senior officers and right-wing politicians who detested "democracy and the French republic". The Gaullian myth – that one man alone redeemed France – has always obscured this muddier reality, he says.

Such critics may protest too much – or too soon. It remains to be seen what President Sarkozy will say in his speech today at the building in Carlton Gardens, just off the Mall, which was De Gaulle's wartime headquarters. The president may, or may not, concede that De Gaulle was a little-followed figure in 1940 and 1941 (although much stronger by 1944).

He may recognise that Le Général was, as he admitted in his war memoirs, the perpetrator of a "giant bluff". None of that takes away from De Gaulle's extraordinary moral courage and his visionary ability to look beyond immediate defeat to the survival of French values and French identity. Even of French greatness.

De Gaulle had been a junior minister of defence for only 12 weeks before June 1940. He had been one of the few successful French commanders in the early part of the Battle of France. In the 1920s and 1930s, he had written books on modern military strategy which foresaw the offensive values of planes and tanks. His opinions were much studied by the Germans and rejected by the Maginot-obsessed French high command.

After Paul Reynaud's government fled to Bordeaux in early June, De Gaulle was one of several voices who insisted that France should fight on. He flew back and forth to London. He supported the extraordinary suggestion put forward by Churchill – but dreamed up by Jean Monnet, one of the founders of the EU – that Britain and France should merge forever into one nation to withstand the "Boche".

The "Frangland" idea – ironic in view of De Gaulle's opposition to British membership of the EEC in the 1960s – was rejected out of hand by the French government. (The British cabinet never even discussed it.) Reynaud, who was under the thumb of his defeatist mistress, allowed Pétain to seize power.

De Gaulle flew back to London from Bordeaux in a small plane on 17 June. His radio declaration the next day – that the war was only beginning and that the real France must fight on – actually came seven days before the armistice which created the Vichy regime and allowed the Nazis to occupy northern and western France. Several British ministers, including the foreign secretary, Lord Halifax, urged Churchill to ignore De Gaulle. They thought that, by appealing to Pétain, they could more easily stop the powerful French fleet from falling into German hands. Churchill insisted on allowing De Gaulle to make his appeal. He provided money and facilities for the volunteers who trickled, rather than flocked, to the France Libre movement.

Later in the war, the two men quarrelled bitterly. De Gaulle came to regard Churchill as a romantic drunk. Churchill became infuriated by De Gaulle's claims – never officially recognised by Britain – to be not just an anti-Nazi resistance leader but the one and true incarnation of French gloire and French national identity. At one point in 1944, when De Gaulle petulantly refused to make a broadcast to the French people before D-Day, Churchill threatened to have him "placed in chains".

The two men were utterly different and very similar. Before the war, Churchill was a distrusted politician. De Gaulle was nobody. By an effort of individual will and a perhaps outdated conviction in the enduring greatness of their countries, they came to incarnate national identity and bloody-minded national determination to survive. Churchill rapidly had most of the country behind him. For two or three years De Gaulle was a kind of "one-man France".

It was entirely through De Gaulle's stubbornness that France was treated after the war as a "victor" rather than a "liberated country". As a result, France was given its own occupation zones in Germany and Berlin.

Although he rapidly became sick of civilian leadership in 1945, De Gaulle returned in 1958, created the president-dominated Fifth Republic and remained in the Elysée Palace until 1969. De Gaulle's sense of French gloire – and the frequent failure of the French to live up to his exalted myth – never deserted him.

He achieved a great deal as president, pursuing a kind of statist nationalism and, at the same time, embracing Franco-German friendship and European unity. He was also largely – although not solely – responsible for imposing an omerta on post-war France which meant that wartime iniquities, including Vichy's involvement in the Holocaust, were not examined until the 1970s.

Paradoxically, it was Chirac, a self-proclaimed Gaullist, who completed the job of dismantling one of the most enduring De Gaulle-inspired myths. When he became president in 1995, Chirac admitted officially, for the first time, that the French state apparatus – not just a few Vichy zealots – had administered the persecution of the Jews in France.

Whether anything now remains of Gaullism, as a political philosophy, is open to question. Even the self-proclaimed Gaullist, President Sarkozy, reversed the general's 1966 decision to take France out of the military structure of Nato. To what extent Mr Sarkozy will try to puncture – or reflate – other Gaullist legends in London today remains open to question.