Céline’s shock interview, found 63 years later

Context

In 1960, a journalist, Roger Mauge of Paris Match, carries out a river interview of Céline on the occasion of the publication of North. He will publish short passages of his meeting in an article published on September 24. The main part of the interview remained unpublished: the cursed writer evokes his romantic art, the literature of his time, but also the Second World War, Hitler, the camps, the decline of the Western world, Africa, races. We hear, raw, his voice, we observe his spirit on the move, sometimes dazzling, and his biases, his obsessions, his excesses. The polemical remarks reported by the writer, which we deliver in his characteristic phrasing, reflect his thought as it persisted until the end of his life. We are publishing large excerpts in agreement with Céline’s heirs, François Gibault and Véronique Robert-Chovin, whom we thank.

The great reporter Paris Match Roger Mauge went to Meudon to interview the writer at home about his latest…