The sulphurous destiny of the unpublished Louis-Ferdinand Céline
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The TV series “ Louis-Ferdinand Céline never seems to have to stop. In the summer of 2021, The world revealed that nearly 6,000 unpublished pages by the writer, missing since the Liberation, had resurfaced in incredible conditions. They were in the hands of a former journalist from ReleaseJean-Pierre Thibaudat, who, after a bitter legal battle, had finally been forced to hand them over to the two heirs of the author of journey to the Edge of the Night (1932). Since then, a first novel drawn from this treasure and published by Gallimard in May, War, became a best-seller (154,000 copies to date). However, a mystery remained: how had this trunk of manuscripts reached Mr. Thibaudat? And, above all, who had given it to him?
The former journalist refused to say it, including to the investigators of the judicial police responsible for questioning him on this subject. But, suddenly, on August 10, in the torpor of summer, he revealed on his blog (hosted by Mediapart) the identity of the donors: the family of Yvon Morandat, famous resistance fighter and ex-Secretary of State for Georges Pompidou. A hypothesis mentioned, among others, by The world in August 2021, but which today makes it possible to trace the course of the famous “manuscript trunk” and, in passing, to somewhat qualify the “black legend” propagated in this regard by Céline himself. Because, ironically, it is indeed a great resistant who saved an entire section of the work of the writer, author of furious anti-Semitic pamphlets and friend of the Germans.
The affair began in the spring of 1944. With the D-Day landings and the Liberation of Paris looming, Louis-Ferdinand Céline knew that his days were numbered on the Butte Montmartre, where he lived with his wife, Lucette. On June 17, after having sewn gold coins into the lining of a jacket, the couple, accompanied by their cat, Bébert, left for Germany, before going into exile in Denmark. In his haste, the novelist cannot take away his manuscripts. Heartbroken, he left them on a cupboard in his apartment in rue Girardon. It was the start of a soap opera obsessively fueled by the writer until his death in 1961: hardly had he left Montmartre than “scrubbers”, as he says, allegedly stole the leaflets from him. “They left me nothing…not a handkerchief, not a chair, not a manuscript…”, he complains thus in From one castle to another (1957). He even accuses by name of this looting a “Corsican Jew”Oscar Rosembly, who will be the ideal culprit for seventy-five years.
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