Louis-Ferdinand Céline

Louis Ferdinand Auguste Destouches, better known by the pen name Louis-Ferdinand Céline, was born on 27 May 1894 in Courbevoie, just outside Paris. He was the only child of Fernand Destouches, a middle manager in an insurance company, and Marguerite-Louise-Céline Guilloux, who owned a boutique selling antique lace. Céline became a French novelist, polemicist, and physician, a writer whose books changed the sound of French fiction while his public antisemitism and conduct during the Second World War made him one of the most disputed figures in modern French letters.

His early years were practical and unsettled. After receiving his Certificat d’études in 1905, he worked as an apprentice, messenger boy, errand boy, and salesperson in various trades, including for silk sellers, jewellers, and a local goldsmith. His parents sent him to Germany and England between 1908 and 1910 so he could learn foreign languages for future work. Though he had left formal schooling, he bought schoolbooks with his wages and studied on his own. Around this period, he began to think, vaguely at first, of becoming a doctor.

In 1912 Céline volunteered for the French army and served in the 12th Cuirassier Regiment at Rambouillet, eventually reaching the rank of sergeant. During the First World War, near Ypres on 25 October 1914, he volunteered to deliver a message under heavy German fire and was wounded in the right arm. He was awarded the médaille militaire for bravery. The war left him with lasting headaches and tinnitus, as well as a lasting hatred of militarism. After service in London at the French passport office, and later work in French-administered Cameroon, his experiences fed both his fiction and his distaste for colonialism.

Medicine became the other main line of his life. In 1918 he worked with the Rockefeller Foundation in Brittany, giving information sessions on tuberculosis and hygiene. Encouraged by Dr Athanase Follet of the University of Rennes, he studied for his baccalaureate, passed in 1919, and married Follet’s daughter, Édith. He enrolled in medical school at Rennes in 1920, later transferred to the University of Paris, and in 1924 defended a dissertation on Philippe-Ignace Semmelweis. That same year he joined the Health Department of the League of Nations in Geneva, work that took him through Europe and Africa, Canada, the United States, and Cuba.

Céline’s first novel, Journey to the End of the Night, appeared in 1932 and won the Prix Renaudot. It divided critics with its bleak view of the human condition and its style drawn from working-class speech. In later books, including Death on the Installment Plan (1936), Guignol’s Band (1944), and Castle to Castle (1957), he developed a still more distinctive voice. Maurice Nadeau wrote that what Joyce did for English, and what the surrealists attempted for French, Céline achieved “effortlessly and on a vast scale.”

From 1937, however, Céline wrote antisemitic polemical works and advocated a military alliance with Nazi Germany. He continued to express antisemitic views during the German occupation of France. After the Allied landing in Normandy in 1944, he fled to Germany and then Denmark, where he lived in exile. In 1951 he was convicted of collaboration by a French court, then pardoned soon after by a military tribunal. He returned to France and resumed work as both doctor and author. His fiction still draws attention for its raw music, black comedy, and spoken force, but it is inseparable from the grave facts of his public hatred and wartime actions.