Louis-Ferdinand Céline was lucky to escape retribution in 1945

They rather like bad boys, the French. Louis-Ferdinand Céline (1894-1961) is one, in a tradition that stretches from François Villon to the dyspeptic Michel Houellebecq. But provocation doesn’t always get you where you want to be, as the careers of Richard Millet and Marc-Édouard Nabe demonstrate.

Journey to the End of the Night, Céline’s first novel, was a huge success when it was published in 1932 and made him a darling of the left, with applause from Trotsky and Jean-Paul Sartre. That didn’t last long. His virulently anti-Semitic pamphlets (so extreme that André Gide thought he was joking) and his arguments for accommodating Hitler resulted in him going on the run at the end of the second world war.

Damian Catani’s biography of Céline is also an extensive commentary on the work. One of the things you discover when you teach creative writing is that writers rarely invent things: they simply change names to avoid getting sued or beaten up. You read a weird yarn about someone building a ladder to the moon and then find it was the author’s summer job. Catani attaches identities to most of Céline’s characters.

Very much a fan, he makes some effort to lighten the charges against him. I’m not convinced it’s worth the bother; you can either digest the sins or not. Apart from anything else, Céline was clearly nutty, like many combatants who survived the battlefields of the first world war (just look at Robert Graves, or indeed Hitler).

It’s true that Céline never signed up to the Nazi hymn sheet. He wasn’t a member of the Groupe Colloboration (yes, that really was an organisation) like the writers Robert Brasillach or Pierre Drieu la Rochelle, and he was friendly with members of the Resistance.