Louis Ferdinand Auguste Destouches (27 May 1894 – 1 July 1961), better known by the pen name Louis-Ferdinand Céline ( ; ), was a French novelist, polemicist, and physician. His first novel Journey to the End of the Night (1932) won the Prix Renaudot but divided critics due to the author's pessimistic depiction of the human condition and his writing style based on working-class speech. In subsequent novels such as Death on the Installment Plan (1936), Guignol's Band (1944) and Castle to Castle (1957), Céline further developed an innovative and distinctive literary style. Maurice Nadeau wrote: "What Joyce did for the English language...what the surrealists attempted to do for the French language, Céline achieved effortlessly and on a vast scale."
From 1937 Céline wrote a series of antisemitic polemical works in which he advocated a military alliance with Nazi Germany. He continued to publicly espouse antisemitic views during the German occupation of France, and after the Allied landing in Normandy in 1944, he fled to Germany and then Denmark where he lived in exile. He was convicted of collaboration by a French court in 1951 but was pardoned by a military tribunal soon after. He returned to France where he resumed his careers as a doctor and author.
Céline is widely considered to be one of the greatest French novelists of the 20th century, and his novels have had an enduring influence on later authors. However, he remains a controversial figure in France due to his antisemitism and activities during the Second World War.
Biography
Early life The only child of Fernand Destouches and Marguerite-Louise-Céline Guilloux, he was born Louis Ferdinand Auguste Destouches in 1894 at Courbevoie, just outside Paris in the Seine département (now Hauts-de-Seine). The family came originally from Normandy on his father's side and Brittany on his mother's side. His father was a middle manager in an insurance company, and his mother owned a boutique where she sold antique lace.Chronology given in the Pléiade edition of his novels, volume I, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, éditions Gallimard, , pp. LV-LVI. In 1905, he was awarded his Certificat d'études, after which he worked as an apprentice and messenger boy in various trades.
Between 1908 and 1910, his parents sent him to Germany and England for a year in each country in order to acquire foreign languages for future employment. From the time he left school until the age of eighteen Céline worked in various jobs, leaving or losing them after only short periods of time. He worked for silk sellers and jewellers first at eleven, as an errand boy, and later as a salesperson for a local goldsmith. Although he was no longer being formally educated, he bought schoolbooks with the money he earned and studied by himself. It was around this time that Céline vaguely thought of becoming a doctor.
World War I and Africa
In 1912, Céline volunteered for the French army (in what he described as an act of rebellion against his parents) and began a three-year enlistment in the 12th Cuirassier Regiment stationed in Rambouillet. At first he was unhappy with military life and considered deserting. However, he adapted and eventually attained the rank of sergeant. The beginning of the First World War brought action to Céline's unit. On 25 October 1914, he volunteered to deliver a message when others were reluctant to do so because of heavy German fire. Near Ypres, during his attempt to deliver the message, he was wounded in his right arm. (Although he was not wounded in the head, as he later claimed, he did suffer severe headaches and tinnitus for the rest of his life.) For his bravery, he was awarded the médaille militaire in November and appeared one year later in the weekly l'Illustré National (November 1915). He later wrote that his wartime experience left him with "a profound disgust for all that is bellicose."
In March 1915, he was sent to London to work in the French passport office. He spent his nights visiting music halls and the haunts of the London underworld and claimed to have met Mata Hari. He later drew on his experiences in the city for his novel Guignol's Band (1944). In September, he was declared unfit for military duty and was discharged from the army. Before returning to France, he married Suzanne Nebout, a French dancer, but the marriage was not registered with the French Consulate, and they soon separated.
In 1916, Céline went to French-administered Cameroon as an employee of the Forestry Company of Sangha-Oubangui. He worked as an overseer on a plantation and a trading post and ran a pharmacy for the local inhabitants, procuring essential medical supplies from his parents in France. He left Africa in April 1917 due to ill health. His experiences in Africa left him with a distaste for colonialism and an increasing passion for medicine as a vocation.
Becoming a doctor (1918–1924) In March 1918, Céline was employed by the Rockefeller Foundation as part of a team travelling around Brittany delivering information sessions on tuberculosis and hygiene. He met Dr Athanase Follet of the Medical Faculty of the University of Rennes and soon became close to Follet's daughter Édith. Dr Follet encouraged him to pursue medicine, and Céline studied for his baccalaureate part-time, passing his examinations in July 1919. He married Édith in August.
Céline enrolled in the Medical Faculty at Rennes in April 1920, and in June, Édith gave birth to a daughter, Collette Destouches. In 1923 he transferred to the University of Paris, and in May 1924 defended his dissertation The Life and Work of Philippe-Ignace Semmelweis (1818–1865), which has been called, "a Célinian novel in miniature".
League of Nations and medical practice (1924–1931)
In June 1924 Céline joined the Health Department of the League of Nations in Geneva, leaving his wife and daughter in Rennes. His duties involved extensive travel in Europe and Africa, Canada, the United States and Cuba. He drew on his time with the League for his play L'Église (The Church, written in 1927, but first published in 1933).
Édith divorced him in June 1926, and a few months later he met Elizabeth Craig, an American dancer studying in Geneva. They were to remain together for the six years in which he established himself as a major author. He later wrote: "I wouldn't have amounted to anything without her."
He left the League of Nations in late 1927 and set up a medical practice in the working-class Paris suburb of Clichy. The practice was not profitable and he supplemented his income working for the nearby public clinic and a pharmaceutical company. In 1929 he gave up his private practice and moved to Montmartre with Elizabeth. However, he continued to practise at the public clinic in Clichy as well as other clinics and working for pharmaceutical companies. In his spare time he worked on his first novel, Voyage au bout de la nuit (Journey to the End of the Night), which was dedicated to Elizabeth, completing it in late 1931.
Writer, physician and polemicist (1932–1939) Voyage au bout de la nuit was published in October 1932 to widespread critical attention. Although Destouches sought anonymity under the pen name Céline, his identity was soon revealed by the press. The novel attracted admirers and detractors across the political spectrum, with some praising its anarchist, anticolonialist and antimilitarist themes, while one critic condemned it as "the cynical, jeering confessions of a man without courage or nobility." A critic for Les Nouvelles littéraires praised 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 condemned it as mere vulgarity and obscenity. The novel was the favourite for the Prix Goncourt of 1932. When the prize was awarded to Mazeline's Les Loups, the resulting scandal increased publicity for Céline's novel, which sold 50,000 copies in the following two months.
Despite the success of Voyage, Céline saw his vocation as medicine and continued his work at the Clichy clinic and private pharmaceutical laboratories. He also began working on a novel about his childhood and youth which was to become Mort à credit (1936, Death on the Installment Plan). In June 1933 Elizabeth Craig returned permanently to America. Céline visited her in Los Angeles the following year but failed to persuade her to return.
Céline initially refused to take a public stance on the rise of Nazism and the increasing extreme-right political agitation in France, explaining to a friend in 1933: "I am and have always been an anarchist, I have never voted...I will never vote for anything or anybody...I don't believe in men...The Nazis loathe me as much as the socialists and the commies too." Nevertheless, in 1935, British critic William Empson had written that Céline appeared to be "a man ripe for fascism".
Mort à credit was published in May 1936, with numerous blank spaces where passages had been removed by the publisher for fear of prosecution for obscenity. The critical response was sharply divided, with the majority of reviewers criticising it for gutter language, pessimism and contempt for humanity. The novel sold 35,000 copies by late 1938.
In August Céline visited Leningrad for a month and on his return quickly wrote and had published an essay, Mea Culpa, in which he denounced communism and the Soviet Union.
In December the following year Bagatelles pour un massacre (Trifles for a Massacre) was published, a book-length racist and antisemitic polemic in which Céline advocated a military alliance with Hitler's Germany in order to save France from war and Jewish hegemony. The book won qualified support from some sections of the French far-right and sold 75,000 copies up to the end of the war. Céline followed Bagatelles with Ecole des cadavres (School for Corpses) (November 1938) in which he developed the themes of antisemitism and a Franco-German alliance.
Céline was now living with Lucette Almansor, a French dancer whom he had met in 1935. They were to marry in 1943 and remain together until Céline's death. On the publication of Bagatelles, Céline quit his jobs at the Clichy clinic and the pharmaceutical laboratory and devoted himself to his writing.
1939 to 1945
At the outbreak of war in September 1939, the draft board declared Céline 70% disabled and unfit for military service. Céline gained employment as a ship's doctor on a troop transport, and in January 1940, the ship accidentally rammed a British torpedo boat, killing twenty British crewmen. In February he found a position as a doctor in a public clinic in Sartrouville northwest of Paris. On the evacuation of Paris in June, Céline and Lucette commandeered an ambulance and evacuated an elderly woman and two newborn infants to La Rochelle. "I did the retreat myself, like many another, I chased the French army all the way from Bezons to La Rochelle, but I could never catch up."
Returning to Paris, Céline was appointed head doctor of the Bezons public clinic and accredited physician to the département of Seine-et-Oise. He moved back to Montmartre and in February 1941 published a third polemical book Les beaux draps (A Fine Mess) in which he denounced Jews, Freemasons, the Catholic Church, the educational system and the French army. The book was later banned by the Vichy government for defaming the French military.
In October 1942, Céline's antisemitic books Bagatelles pour un massacre and L'École des cadavres were republished in new editions, only months after the round-up of French Jews at the Vélodrome d'Hiver. Céline devoted most of his time during the occupation years to his medical work and writing a new novel, Guignol's Band, a hallucinatory reworking of his experiences in London during World War I. The novel was published in March 1944 to poor sales.