Louis-Ferdinand Céline, literary genius or national pariah? Defining moral parameters for influential cultural figures, post-Charlie Hebdo

Abstract

In January 2011 the French Minister of Culture, Frédéric Mitterrand, withdrew Louis-Ferdinand Céline from a list of canonical French authors specifically selected for a national celebration of culture. This bold decision was deeply divisive: while many welcomed Mitterrand’s intervention, a number of prominent writers, some of them Jewish, opposed it on the grounds that Céline’s unacceptable political beliefs – expressed in three anti-Semitic pamphlets and his flirtation with Nazism – should not overshadow his literary genius. In the light of this controversy, and of the rise in anti-Semitism following the Charlie Hebdo attacks of January 2015, this paper proposes Céline as a vital case study of the moral parameters a democratic nation should apply to a culturally important figure whose political views are deemed unacceptably reactionary.