He returns to his home a national hero and marries the young girl he has not forgotten, but their happiness is interrupted by the onset of World War I. Fort Saganne was screened out of competition at the 1984 Cannes Film Festival.

[5] In 1911, a willful and determined man from peasant stock named Charles Saganne (Gérard Depardieu) enlists in the military and is assigned to the Sahara Desert under the aristocratic Colonel Dubreuilh (Philippe Noiret).

In Variety magazine, the reviewer observed that the film "is often fine in its large-scale reconstruction of a time and place and a mentality, but falters in its attempts to inscribe well-detailed characters in its wide-screen canvas.

[7]In her review in Allmovie, Eleanor Mannikka gave the film three out of five stars, noting that the "sweep of this epic skims over the qualities that transformed Saganne from an ordinary officer to a great military leader.

"[8] Mannikka concluded: Even though the costuming, landscape, battles, and charisma of Depardieu as Saganne and Noiret as Colonel Dubreuilh are outstanding, and several subsidiary characters deliver emotionally compelling vignettes, the protagonists as an ensemble have not been scripted with much depth of character—making the three-hour epic seem a bit too long in the end.