The President 1961

Aged 73 and in ill-health, the former French prime minister, Jean Gabin as Émile Beaufort, spends his days in a country house near Evreux, dictating his memoirs to a loyal secretary. The act of writing serves as a bridge between a life lived in public urgency and a private memory that refuses to fade. As Beaufort drifts back to a pivotal moment from roughly two decades earlier, the narrative recalls the pressure cooker of currency policy: he was forced to devalue the currency, a decision he would carry with him in silence. After secretly meeting with the governor of the central bank and the minister of finance, he agrees to announce the move on a Monday. That very morning, a wave of currency speculation sweeps the markets, and Beaufort realizes that only one other person knew of the plan: Bernard Blier as Philippe Chalamont, head of his private office, whose father-in-law was a banker. The weight of that confession becomes a weapon of leverage, and Beaufort compels Chalamont to write out and sign a document he has guarded ever since.

In Beaufort’s final term, his commitment to European unity marks him as a reconciliatory figure, one who believes that a united Europe could heal the hatreds that have scarred the continent. Yet the political battlefield is tangled with rivalries, and his most persuasive opponent turns out to be Chalamont, a rising politician who argues that European integration would harm French business. Beaufort observes the clash with a wary, almost clinical eye, and his resignation from politics follows, a public withdrawal that hints at the private calculus behind leadership and legacy.

The present-day drama intensifies as Chalamont is summoned to form a government, and Beaufort awaits him in Evreux that evening. Before the visitor arrives, Beaufort retrieves the confession from its hiding place, slides it into his pocket, and nods off by the fire. He is jolted awake when his secretary appears, revealing she has been bribed to locate the incriminating document. Beaufort burns the confession without a second thought, the flames a visible symbol of his restraint and control. He waits for the confrontation, a quiet test of wills that will determine who truly governs memory and power in a country that has learned to fear both.

When Chalamont finally enters, he delivers a practiced opening—an appeal to Beaufort’s continued influence and a refreshed belief in European unity. Beaufort listens, but beneath the courteous rhetoric lies a cooler calculus: he will not allow France to be mocked by a government led by someone he deems a crook and a liar. The tension crystallizes in a defining moment of moral reckoning, as Beaufort’s threats to reveal the currency incident loom as a possible lever to shape the political landscape. The next morning brings a blunt, rectangular truth: Chalamont has declined to form a new government, leaving Beaufort’s legacy and the country’s future in a fragile limbo, where memory, power, and principle collide on the edge of public record. In the quiet aftermath, the film leaves us with a meditation on how leaders are remembered—not by the grand gestures of policy alone, but by the shadows of the choices they keep hidden and the truths they choose to reveal.