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. Fierce row over plans to publish antisemitic texts by French writer Céline Read more

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 anti-Semitic hatred of the author." 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. 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. 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. "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." New film rekindles an old conflict Read more

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.
Bowing to pressure, French publisher Gallimard suspends plans to reprint a compendium of "violently antisemitic pamphlets" by novelist Louis-Ferdinand Céline.