It’s nearly fifty years since the death of one of France’s greatest 20th century novelists: Louis Ferdinand Auguste Destouches, more commonly known under his nom de plume, Louis-Ferdinand Céline. And yet there will be no officially sanctioned celebration for the author of Journey to the End of the Night and North. It has been decided by the Culture Minister, after strong protests from France’s Jewish community, that Céline will not be commemorated in the official French cultural celebrations for 2011.
On Friday evening, the French culture minister Frédéric Mitterrand stated:
After a period of sustained reflection … I have decided not to include Céline in this year’s national celebrations. This is in no sense to be taken as a disavowal of the Senior Committee’s choices (who decide upon the list) but as an adjustment that I have made myself.
This was the end to a week of literary and political controversy. When it became clear last Wednesday that the committee were set to include Céline amongst the list of cultural luminaries to be honoured, the President of the Association of Sons and Daughters of Deported French Jews (FFDJF) , Serge Klarsfeld reacted immediately: “It would be an honourable act, if the Culture Minister were to remove Céline from the list immediately, as we have been requesting.” He went on to comment that: “His (Céline’s) authorial talent should not make us forget that this was a man who called for the murder of Jews under the occupation. If the Republic celebrates him, it will bring shame upon itself.”
Henri Godard, one of France’s leading Céline scholars, greeted Mitterand’s announcement on Friday with dismay, saying that he felt “completely trapped by this about turn” and added sardonically “I thought that we had changed, that the ghosts had been laid to rest. The term of celebration is mistaken. This is not a question of a hagiography, or arranging a memorial, but about using this anniversary in order to look at Céline’s writing, which is more and more widely read, afresh.”
The central point of contention in this controversy is the existence of a number of violently anti-Semitic tracts that Céline wrote in the late 1930s, amongst which his notorious 1938 pamphlet School of Corpses is most well known. Serge Klarsfeld has claimed that it is impossible to square this explicit anti-Semitism with the words in the preface to the list of cultural figures to be celebrated, which state that this is “a list of individuals worthy of celebration: that is to say, those whose life, work, moral conduct and the values which they have represented are recognised today as having been remarkable.”
The controversy demonstrates that France still struggles to reconcile itself with its legacy of prevalent cultural and political anti-Semitism prior to 1945. It remains haunted by events such as the appalling round up of some 13,000 French Jews at the Vélodrome d’Hiver in Paris in July 1942, as was demonstrated by the success of Roselyne Bosch’s mediocre commerative film La Rafle (The Round Up) in France last year. Yet is the failure to recognise the work of one of France’s greatest authors of the last century really going to help to heal these enduring historical wounds? Céline’s reaction to the controversy would no doubt have been typically taciturn. He might have responded in those world-weary tones of Ferdinand, the protagonist of Journey to the End of the Night, and distainfully defered to his prefered retort of “chacun son genre” (“to each their own way”.)
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