When Paris Match came to write up its interview with Louis-Ferdinand Céline in 1960, the periodical concluded that if you looked hard enough, the great 20th-century writer was “nice deep down”, reports The Times.
Now, however, Le Figaro newspaper has obtained and published a full transcript of the interview, which has been kept hidden for six decades. In it, Céline, a literary giant compared to the likes of James Joyce, does not come over as nice at all.
Not only did he abstain from apologising for his antisemitic writings and support for the Nazi regime, he suggested that Adolf Hitler’s great mistake was failing to “wipe out England” at the start of the Second World War.
Céline also used the interview to express sexist views, his loathing of popular culture and dislike of the French Resistance to Nazi Germany.
The gulf between the reality of his words and what David Alliot, an author and Céline specialist, described as the “sweetened” and “polite” version that appeared in Paris Match is stark. “The two versions are very different,” Alliot said, suggesting that Paris Match may have wanted to avoid stirring controversy over a writer widely viewed as “nitroglycerin”.
The interview was published when France was still reluctant to face up to its collaboration with Hitler — a stance determined by General Charles de Gaulle, the Resistance leader and post-war president, who was keen to avoid divisions. It was only in the 1990s that the French state officially accepted for the first time that it had had a role in the persecution and deportation of Jews.
Céline embodied the nation’s ambiguities, courted by the media but detested by his neighbours in the Paris suburb where he lived upon his return to France after the war. They signed a petition demanding that he be forced to move away.