Louis-Ferdinand Céline

• 1. Introduction

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  Louis-Ferdinand Céline completed the second draft of his final novel on the 30th of June 1961. He died at home the very next day, of a ruptured aneurysm. The timing was almost too neat for a man who spent his life insisting that death was the only honest subject worth writing about.

  Born Louis Ferdinand Auguste Destouches on the 27th of May 1894 in Courbevoie, just outside Paris, he would eventually take the pen name Céline from his maternal grandmother. He was a doctor who treated the poor, a novelist who shattered the conventions of French prose, and a polemicist whose antisemitic writings made him one of the most reviled figures in twentieth-century French culture.

  How do you square a literary giant with a man who told a German officer in December 1941 that he was astonished the Germans had not exterminated the French Jews? That question has no comfortable answer. What follows is an attempt to hold both truths at once.

• 2. Forged in War and Wandering

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  On the 25th of October 1914, near Ypres, a young sergeant named Destouches volunteered to deliver a message through heavy German fire when others refused. He was wounded in his right arm during the attempt. For that act of bravery he received the médaille militaire in November and was featured a year later in the weekly illustrated magazine l'Illustré National.

  He had enlisted in 1912, in what he described as an act of rebellion against his parents, joining the 12th Cuirassier Regiment at Rambouillet. At first he hated military life and considered deserting. He adapted. Then the war arrived and changed everything. He later wrote that the experience left him with "a profound disgust for all that is bellicose."

  The wound ended his active service sooner than expected. By March 1915 he was in London working at the French passport office, spending his nights in music halls and the haunts of the London underworld. He later claimed to have met Mata Hari there. Those London nights would eventually become the raw material for his 1944 novel Guignol's Band.

  After London came Africa. In 1916 he traveled to French-administered Cameroon, working as an overseer on a plantation and running a pharmacy for local inhabitants, procuring medical supplies from his parents back in France. He left in April 1917, ill, and with a lasting distaste for colonialism. Africa deepened the pull toward medicine that had been building since his teenage years.

• 3. The Making of a Doctor

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  In March 1918, Céline was part of a Rockefeller Foundation team traveling around Brittany delivering public health sessions on tuberculosis and hygiene. That assignment brought him to Dr Athanase Follet of the Medical Faculty at the University of Rennes, and to Follet's daughter Édith, whom he married in August 1919.

  He had passed his baccalaureate examinations in July of that year, studying part-time while working, having left school at eleven to work as an errand boy for silk sellers and jewellers. He enrolled in the Medical Faculty at Rennes in April 1920. In May 1924 he defended his doctoral dissertation on the Hungarian physician Philippe-Ignace Semmelweis, the pioneer of antiseptic practice who died in 1865. Critics would later call that thesis "a Célinian novel in miniature."

  From June 1924 he worked for the Health Department of the League of Nations in Geneva, a position that sent him across Europe, Africa, Canada, the United States, and Cuba. He drew on that period for his play L'Église, written in 1927. By late 1927 he had left the League and set up a medical practice in the working-class Paris suburb of Clichy. The practice was not profitable. He supplemented his income at a nearby public clinic and worked for pharmaceutical companies.

  It was also in Geneva that he met Elizabeth Craig, an American dancer. He later wrote: "I wouldn't have amounted to anything without her." Journey to the End of the Night, which he completed in late 1931, was dedicated to her.

• 4. Journey and Its Aftermath

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  Voyage au bout de la nuit was published in October 1932, and Céline had tried to stay anonymous behind his pen name. The press quickly exposed him. Readers and critics split along almost every imaginable line. Some praised its anarchist, anticolonialist, and antimilitarist themes. One critic called it "the cynical, jeering confessions of a man without courage or nobility." A critic for Les Nouvelles littéraires celebrated the author's use of spoken colloquial French as "an extraordinary language, the height of the natural and the artificial," while the critic for Le Populaire de Paris dismissed it as mere vulgarity.

  The novel was the favourite for the 1932 Prix Goncourt. When the prize went to Mazeline's Les Loups instead, the resulting scandal drove up Céline's sales. The novel sold 50,000 copies in the two months following the announcement.

  Céline continued working at the Clichy clinic. He did not see himself primarily as a writer. In June 1933, Elizabeth Craig returned permanently to America. He visited her in Los Angeles the following year, but could not persuade her to come back.

  Mort à credit appeared in May 1936, with blank spaces where passages had been removed by the publisher to avoid prosecution for obscenity. The majority of reviewers attacked it. The novel sold 35,000 copies by late 1938. That same August, Céline traveled to Leningrad for a month, and on his return published Mea Culpa, a short essay denouncing communism and the Soviet Union. The following December, he published Bagatelles pour un massacre, a book-length antisemitic polemic that would define the darkest chapter of his life.

• 5. The Polemics and the Occupation

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  Bagatelles pour un massacre advocated a military alliance with Hitler's Germany to save France from what Céline called Jewish hegemony. The book sold 75,000 copies up to the end of the war. Biographer Frédéric Vitoux concluded that through the force of his voice and the respect in which it was held, Céline had made himself "the most popular and most resounding spokesman of prewar antisemitism."

  His second polemical work, Ecole des cadavres, followed in November 1938. His third, Les beaux draps, appeared in February 1941, during the German occupation. In that book he lamented that "France is Jewish and Masonic, once and for all." He also contributed more than thirty letters, interviews, and responses to collaborationist publications during the occupation years.

  The German officer and writer Ernst Jünger recorded in his Paris war diaries that Céline told him on the 7th of December 1941 of his astonishment that the Germans had not exterminated the French Jews. Even figures within the Nazi propaganda apparatus found his pronouncements extreme. The German superintendent of propaganda in France believed Céline "started from correct racial notions" but that his slang and obscenities spoiled his "good intentions" with "hysterical wailing."

  In October 1942, Céline's antisemitic books were republished in new editions, only months after the mass roundup of French Jews at the Vélodrome d'Hiver. When the Allies landed in Normandy in June 1944, Céline and his companion Lucette Almansor fled to Germany, eventually reaching Sigmaringen, where the Germans had housed the Vichy government in exile. Using connections with the German occupying forces, he obtained visas for Denmark and arrived there in late March 1945. His stay in Sigmaringen would later become the subject of the postwar novel Castle to Castle.

• 6. Exile, Trial, and Return

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  In November 1945 the new French government applied for Céline's extradition on charges of collaboration. The following month Danish authorities arrested him and held him at Vestre Prison pending the extradition decision. He was released in June 1947 on condition that he remain in Denmark.

  His books had been withdrawn from sale in France. He was living off a hoard of gold coins he had hidden in Denmark before the war. In 1948 he moved to a farmhouse on the coast of the Great Belt, the property of his Danish lawyer, where he worked on the novels that would become Féerie pour une autre fois and Normance.

  The French tried him in absentia in February 1951, finding him guilty and sentencing him to one year in jail, a fine of 50,000 francs, and confiscation of half his property. An amnesty from a French military tribunal followed in April, based on his status as a disabled war veteran. In July he returned to France.

  Back in Paris, he signed a contract with Gallimard to republish all his novels. He and Lucette, whom he had married in 1943, bought a villa in Meudon on the southwestern outskirts of Paris. He registered as a doctor again in 1953 and set up a practice at home while Lucette opened a dance school on the top floor. His first two postwar novels found little audience. But his 1957 novel D'un château l'autre attracted considerable critical attention and sold close to 30,000 copies in its first year.

• 7. Style as Rebellion

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  Céline rejected what he called the French "academic" literary style, built on elegance, clarity, and exactitude. He described his alternative as descending into "the intimacy of things, into the fibre, the nerves, the feelings of things" and going straight to the end "in maintained poetic tension, in inner life, like the métro through an inner city."

  His tool for this was the language of those who had no literary voice. Journey to the End of the Night and Death on the Installment Plan drew on the spoken French of the working class, medical and nautical jargon, neologisms, the slang of soldiers, sailors, and the criminal underworld. He developed a punctuation system built on extensive ellipses and exclamation marks. Literary critic Merlin Thomas described those three dots as "almost comparable to the pointing of a psalm: they divide the text into rhythmical rather than syntactical units."

  Céline called this increasingly syncopated approach his "little music." Maurice Nadeau wrote that what Joyce did for the English language and what the surrealists attempted for French, "Céline achieved effortlessly and on a vast scale."

  The style evolved as the subject matter darkened. In his final war trilogy, Castle to Castle, North, and Rigadoon, biographer Patrick McCarthy writes that "all worlds disappear into an eternal nothingness" and the language dissolves with them: short, bare phrases that mirror the disintegration they describe. George Steiner placed Céline alongside Proust as one of the two writers whose work "lead into the idiom and sensibility of twentieth-century narrative."

• 8. A Contested Legacy

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  In 2011, the fiftieth anniversary of Céline's death, his name appeared on an official French government list of 500 people and events associated with French culture to be celebrated nationally. Following protests, Frédéric Mitterrand, then French Minister of Culture and Communication, announced that Céline would be removed from the list because of his antisemitic writings.

  The controversy over his antisemitic books surfaced again in December 2017 when the publisher Gallimard announced plans to republish them. The French government and Jewish leaders expressed concern. In January 2018 Gallimard suspended publication, then in March clarified that it still intended to issue a critical edition with scholarly introductions.

  Then came a discovery. In August 2021, it emerged that a Libération journalist, Jean-Pierre Thibaudat, had handed over to Nanterre police in March 2020 a collection of Céline's unpublished manuscripts, including La Volonté du roi Krogold and Londres, along with 6,000 unpublished pages of already published works. The manuscripts had been missing since Céline fled Paris in 1944. French writer and Céline expert David Alliot said it would take many years for these writings to be completely appreciated and published.

  In May 2022, Gallimard published Guerre, and Londres followed in October 2022. That novel, probably written in 1934, includes as a key character a Jewish doctor. The lost manuscripts have been described as "one of the greatest literary discoveries of the past century but also one of the most troubling." The tension in that phrase captures Céline's place in French letters as well as anything written about him.