French publisher shelves reprint of Celine’s anti-Semitic texts

France’s most famed publishing house bows to pressure and suspends plans to reissue a collection of violently anti-Semitic pamphlets by novelist Louis-Ferdinand Celine.

The Gallimard publishing house sparked an outcry last week when it revealed it intended to publish a 1,000-page compendium of the controversial writer’s essays from the late 1930s.

The French lawyer and Nazi-hunter Serge Klarsfeld threatened legal action to stop them, saying that Celine had “influenced a whole generation of collaborationists who sent French Jews to their deaths.”

But Gallimard tells AFP that it was shelving plans to reprint the texts in full.

“I am suspending the project, having judged that conditions were not right for ensuring a proper job in terms of methodology and history,” publisher Antoine Gallimard says.

The publisher had earlier insisted that the pamphlets, which have been out of print since 1945, would be put “in their context as writings of great violence and marked by the anti-Semitic hatred of the author.”

It claimed that it wanted to issue a “critical edition” of the anti-Jewish diatribes, which have tarnished the reputation of the author of “Journey to the End of the Night”.

Celine fled France after the D-Day landings in Normandy in 1944 and was later convicted in his absence of collaborating with the Nazis.

— AFP