“Céline, les manuscrits retrouvés”

On June 17, 1944, feeling threatened as the Liberation approached for his anti-Semitic and collaborationist writings, Céline fled France with his wife Lucette. The writer left several bundles of manuscripts in his Parisian apartment, which he would later lament after the war had been stolen. Recently rediscovered, these exceptional manuscripts, exhibited for the first time at the Galerie Gallimard (Paris 7th), shed light on the literary project that inspired Céline after the publication of Voyage au bout de la nuit in 1932: a large triptych, relating to periods of his life that were not or barely developed in his first novel – childhood, the war and London. Thousands of unpublished pages bear witness to this enterprise, of which only the first part would be completed with Mort à crédit in 1936. But Céline, and this is the great revelation, had made progress on the other novels, in particular the one evoking the central episode of his life: the experience of the front and his war injury in October 1914. A trauma that would decide the life of a man as well as the literary work to come, the latter alone having the power to reveal what is really at stake in the lived experience.

This book, richly illustrated with reproductions of manuscripts, original photographs and period documents, is the booklet of the exhibition presented at the Galerie Gallimard (May-July 2022) on the occasion of the publication of Guerre , an unpublished novel by Louis-Ferdinand Céline based on the manuscripts found. It presents the manuscript of Guerre , but also those, soon to be published, of Londres , La Volonté du roi Krogold and Casse-pipe (edition augmented with scenes from military life).