French publishing house Gallimard cancels plan to reissue a collection of the controversial writer’s essays from the late 1930s after sparking uproar

This article is more than 1 year old

This article is more than 1 year old

France’s most famed publishing house has bowed to pressure and suspended plans to reissue a collection of violently antisemitic pamphlets by novelist Louis-Ferdinand Céline.

Gallimard sparked an outcry last week when it revealed it intended to publish a 1,000-page compendium of the controversial writer’s essays from the late 1930s.

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The French lawyer and Nazi-hunter Serge Klarsfeld threatened legal action to stop them, saying that Céline had “influenced a whole generation of collaborationists who sent French Jews to their deaths”.

But on Thursday Gallimard told AFP that it was shelving plans to reprint the texts in full.

“I am suspending the project, having judged that conditions were not right for ensuring a proper job in terms of methodology and history,” Antoine Gallimard said.

The publisher had earlier insisted that the pamphlets, which have been out of print since 1945, would be put “in their context as writings of great violence and marked by the antisemitic hatred of the author”.

It claimed that it wanted to issue a “critical edition” of the anti-Jewish diatribes, which have tarnished the reputation of the author of Journey to the End of the Night.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Portrait of Louis-Ferdinand Céline. Photograph: Keystone-France/Gamma-Keystone via Getty Images

Céline fled France after the D-day landings in Normandy in 1944 and was later convicted in his absence of collaborating with the Nazis.

He died in 1961 saying he did not want the pamphlets to be reissued, but the lawyer of his widow, Lucette Destouches, now 105, recently gave consent for a reprint.



“Céline’s pamphlets belong to the most infamous chapter of French antisemitism,” Gallimard said in a statement to AFP.

“But to censor them prevents light being shed on their ideological roots and only attracts unhealthy curiosity,” it added.

Gallimard said he “understood the feelings of readers who might find this re-edition shocking, hurtful or worrying for obvious ethical reasons”.

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France’s main Jewish group said Tuesday that the texts, written between 1937 and 1941, months after the start of the German occupation of France, were a “gross incitation to racist and antisemitic hate”.

The head of the French Council of Jewish Institutions (Crif), Francis Kalifat, had appealed to Gallimard to abandon these “rants”.

And a group of four leading French historians signed a blistering attack on the publishers in the weekly magazine L’Obs, calling the idea to reprint the pamphlets “at best voyeurism and at worst nostalgia, which risked sanctifying incitement to murder”.

The pamphlets, which were never banned in France, come out of copyright in 2031.</s>France's most famed publishing house bowed to pressure Thursday and suspended plans to reissue a collection of violently anti-Semitic pamphlets by novelist Louis-Ferdinand Celine.

Gallimard sparked an outcry last week when it revealed it intended to publish a 1,000-page compendium of the controversial writer's essays from the late 1930s.

The French lawyer and Nazi-hunter Serge Klarsfeld threatened legal action to stop them, saying that Celine had "influenced a whole generation of collaborationists who sent French Jews to their deaths."

But on Thursday Gallimard told AFP that it was shelving plans to reprint the texts in full.

"I am suspending the project, having judged that conditions were not right for ensuring a proper job in terms of methodology and history," Antoine Gallimard said.

The publisher had earlier insisted that the pamphlets, which have been out of print since 1945, would be put "in their context as writings of great violence and marked by the anti-Semitic hatred of the author."

It claimed that it wanted to issue a "critical edition" of the anti-Jewish diatribes, which have tarnished the reputation of the author of "Journey to the End of the Night".

Celine fled France after the D-Day landings in Normandy in 1944 and was later convicted in his absence of collaborating with the Nazis.

He died in 1961 saying he did not want the pamphlets to be reissued, but the lawyer of his widow, Lucette Destouches, now 105, recently gave consent for a reprint.

"Celine's pamphlets belong to the most infamous chapter of French anti-Semitism," Gallimard said in a statement to AFP.

"But to censure them prevents light being shed on their ideological roots and only attracts unhealthy curiosity," it added.

Gallimard said he "understood the feelings of readers who might find this re-edition shocking, hurtful or worrying for obvious ethical reasons."

France's main Jewish group said Tuesday that the texts, written between 1937 and 1941, months after the start of the German occupation of France, were a "gross incitation to racist and anti-Semitic hate".

The head of the French Council of Jewish Institutions (Crif), Francis Kalifat, had appealed to Gallimard to abandon these "rants".

And a group of four leading French historians signed a blistering attack on the publishers in the weekly magazine L'Obs, calling the idea to reprint the pamphlets "at best voyeurism and at worst nostalgia, which risked sanctifying incitement to murder."

The pamphlets, which were never banned in France, come out of copyright in 2031.

Gallimard's supporters argued that the texts were readily available on the internet "without any mediation or context" and could be also bought from secondhand book shops across France.</s>The "methodological and memorial conditions" necessary to allow the three pamphlets to be published "dispassionately" do not exist at the moment, Gallimard boss Antoine Gallimard said in a statement Thursday.

The author of Journey to the End of the Night, whose real name was Louis Ferdinand Destouches, wrote them in the 1930s and 1940s in the run-up to World War II and under the Nazi occupation of France.

At the end of the war he fled to Denmark.

A French court sentenced him to a year in prison, which he served in a Danish jail, for collaboration with the Germans.

The pamphlets have not been republished in France since, although they are available online and in an edition published in Canada in 2012.

In December, after Gallimard announced its plan to publish a similar edition in France, Frédéric Potier, the head of the government's committee against anti-Semitism and racism, summoned Gallimard to his office.

He reportedly to express his concern that the edition should be supervised and annotated by a group of experts, including historians, especially since it was to be published at a time of rising anti-Semitism.

Gallimard replied that he planned to work only with Régis Tettamanzi, an academic who published the Canadian edition.

The project sparked protests from historians, literary critics and campaigners, among them Serge Klarsfeld, the president of a group representing the children of deportees, and Pierre-André Targuieff, the author of a book on Céline and anti-Semitism.

"Céline's pamphlets belong the history of the most despicable French anti-Semitism," Gallimard said in his statement on Thursday. "But to condemn them to censorship impedes the full clarification of their roots and their ideological impact and creates an unhealthy curiosity where we should exercise our faculty of judgement."

But he added, "I understand and share the feelings of readers shocked or concerned by the prospect of publication for obvious human and ethical reasons."
Bowing to pressure, French publisher Gallimard suspends plans to reprint a compendium of "violently antisemitic pamphlets" by novelist Louis-Ferdinand Céline.