— Ch. 1 · The Wounded Sergeant —
Louis-Ferdinand Céline.
~5 min read · Ch. 1 of 5
Louis-Ferdinand Céline was born Louis Ferdinand Auguste Destouches on the 27th of May 1894 in Courbevoie, a suburb just outside Paris. His father worked as a middle manager for an insurance company while his mother ran a boutique selling antique lace. The family traced its roots to Normandy and Brittany before settling near the capital. He left school at age eleven to work as an errand boy for silk sellers and jewellers. Despite losing jobs quickly, he bought schoolbooks with his wages to study alone. By eighteen, he had vaguely considered becoming a doctor but remained adrift in various trades.
In 1912, Céline volunteered for the French army in what he described as an act of rebellion against his parents. He joined the 12th Cuirassier Regiment stationed in Rambouillet and eventually rose to the rank of sergeant. The outbreak of World War I brought immediate danger to his unit. On the 25th of October 1914, he volunteered to deliver a message through heavy German fire when others refused. Near Ypres during this attempt, he suffered a wound to his right arm. Although he later claimed head injuries, he actually endured severe headaches and tinnitus for the rest of his life. For his bravery, he received the médaille militaire in November 1914 and appeared in the weekly l'Illustré National one year later.
The Voice Of The Streets
Céline published his first novel Journey to the End of the Night in October 1932 under the pen name Louis-Ferdinand Céline. The book won the Prix Renaudot but divided critics sharply over its pessimistic depiction of human suffering. A critic for Les Nouvelles littéraires praised the author's use of spoken colloquial French as extraordinary yet artificial. Another voice from Le Populaire de Paris condemned it as mere vulgarity and obscenity. The novel sold 50,000 copies within two months despite losing the Prix Goncourt to another work.
His second novel Death on the Installment Plan arrived in May 1936 with numerous blank spaces where passages had been removed by publishers fearing prosecution. Reviewers criticized the gutter language and contempt for humanity while sales reached 35,000 copies by late 1938. Céline developed a unique literary style based on working-class speech, medical jargon, nautical terms, and criminal slang. He created an idiosyncratic punctuation system using extensive ellipses and exclamation marks. Maurice Nadeau later wrote that Céline achieved what Joyce did for English or surrealists attempted for French language effortlessly and on a vast scale.The Polemicist Emerges
In December 1937 Céline published Bagatelles pour un massacre, a book-length racist polemic advocating military alliance with Hitler's Germany. The text claimed France needed protection from Jewish hegemony and won qualified support from sections of the far-right. It sold 75,000 copies up to the end of the war. He followed this with Ecole des cadavres in November 1938 developing themes of antisemitism and Franco-German alliance. These works marked his shift from fiction to virulent political commentary.
During the German occupation of France he continued expressing antisemitic views publicly. In February 1941 he published Les beaux draps denouncing Jews, Freemasons, the Catholic Church, and the educational system. The Vichy government later banned the book for defaming the French military. Céline contributed over thirty letters and interviews to collaborationist press including many antisemitic statements. A German officer named Ernst Jünger recorded in his Paris war diaries that Céline expressed consternation that Germans had not exterminated French Jews by December 1941. Some Nazis considered his pronouncements so extreme they were counterproductive.