This article is taken from Figaro Hors-série Céline, une saison en enfer, a special issue published for the 130th anniversary of the birth of the writer of Voyage au bout de la nuit, on May 27, 1894. In order to be kept up to date up to date with historical and cultural news, subscribe for free to the Lettre du Figaro Histoire.
On May 27, 1894, when Louis Destouches was born, Sadi Carnot was President of the French Republic, but not for much longer. On June 24, he was assassinated in Lyon by Caserio, an Italian anarchist, who was promptly guillotined on August 16. Auguste Vaillant had been arrested on February 5 for detonating a bomb in the Chamber of Deputies, but Ravachol had preceded them on the grounds of justice on July 11, 1892. All over Europe, crowned heads were shattered by the bombs anarchists who also operate with knives and guns. Another significant event, on October 15, 1894, artillery captain Alfred Dreyfus was arrested for high treason and, on December 22, the war council, unanimously of its seven members, condemned him to deportation and death. degradation.
Fernand Destouches, Louis’ father, a modest employee at the Le Phénix insurance company, was delighted to see that justice had been done so quickly and so well. The traitor Dreyfus was going to pay for his crimes, but his racial brothers continued to dominate French society, they held the upper hand, industry, banks and big business and ruined the small shopkeepers, including his wife, Marguerite. Guillou, Louis’ mother, a merchant in the toilet, specializing in curiosities, junk and old lace. We can see the origin, or at least one of the explanations, of the anti-Semitism which exploded in 1937 in Bagatelles pour un massacre.
Also read “Louis-Ferdinand Céline, this frightening genius”, the editorial by Michel De Jaeghere
Louis was born at Ramp du Pont in Courbevoie, and he claimed his status as a suburbanite all his life. It was also not far from there, in Bas-Meudon, also on the banks of the Seine, that he gave his soul back to God on July 1, 1961. Louis Destouches was born in a very ordinary little house that his parents will quickly leave to settle in Paris, because it is in Paris that brilliant careers and great fortunes are made.
His mother is modest, but his father has pretensions and sometimes signs himself “des Touches”. The child is raised straddling three social environments, in a bourgeois, even petty-bourgeois, environment, but according to aristocratic principles, and with proletarian means. And, as the Destouches have little income and no capital, they will only have one child to only have one mouth to feed. Louis will therefore remain an only child and will be raised in solitude, the fear of poverty, hatred of Jews, fear of scandal and concern for respectability. Forty years later, in 1936, the writer Céline recounted her childhood in Death on Credit, of which he gave a romantic, extravagant, but true version. He will force the line, darken, multiply the excesses, revealing how much his childhood marked him and how much he suffered from solitude, which was one of the constants of his life as a man.
For now, “little Louis” is still a child raised in the Opéra shopping district, a stone’s throw from the Grands Boulevards, the Bel-Ami district and also that of Pot-Bouille, in the Choiseul passage, which Céline described as a “gas bell”, from which we could not see the sky. To the doctor who comes to see the child who suffers from anemia, Céline says in Death on Credit: “Your visit (…) is a real nasty bell… We wouldn’t bring radishes there! It’s a urinal with no way out… Go away!…” And he writes in Voyage au bout de la nuit: “everyone knew each other from shop to shop, like in a real little province, for years stuck between two streets of Paris, that is to say that people spied on each other there and slandered each other humanly to the point of delirium.”
Louis goes to the local school on rue de Louvois. There he experienced what he called, in Les Beaux Draps, “the great mutilation of youth”. The director notes him thus: “Intelligent child but excessively lazy, maintained by the weakness of his parents. » Louis was then registered as a day student at the Saint-Joseph des Tuileries school, rue du 29-Juillet, where he received religious education. He completed his studies at the municipal school on rue d’Argenteuil and obtained his school certificate in 1907. The child, who was quick-witted, curious about everything and exceptionally intelligent, suffocated at school and in the cramped environment of Passage Choiseul. He only dreams of adventure and freedom.
Céline, a season in hell, Le Figaro Special Edition. €14.90, on newsstands or on Figaro Store