The anti-Semitic writer’s thousands of pages, which had mysteriously disappeared in 1944, were in the hands of a resistance fighter.
A year after the reappearance, in mysterious circumstances, of the lost manuscripts of Louis-Ferdinand Céline, the journalist Jean-Pierre Thibaudat, at the center of the affair, affirms Wednesday August 10 on Mediapart that they were kept by the family of the resistant Yvon Morandat.
These 6,000 unpublished sheets had been recovered at the end of July 2021 by the heirs of the collaborationist and anti-Semitic writer Louis-Ferdinand Céline (1894-1961) and his widow, Lucette Destouches, who died in 2019. The existence of these documents had been made public a month later by the newspaper The world, but their origin remains mysterious. Justice had opened, following a complaint filed by the beneficiaries, an investigation for “receiving theft” on this subject, which was dismissed.
Read alsoThe incredible discovery of Celine’s unpublished manuscripts
One year after this discovery, which led to the publication in early May of War (Gallimard, 140,000 copies sold), Jean-Pierre Thibaudat affirms that these sheets, abandoned by the writer when he had fled France for Germany in June 1944, were kept by the resistant Yvon Morendat, who “lived in Celine’s requisitioned apartment” at the Liberation. This man was one of the first thirty volunteers who joined General de Gaulle in London. Then, for 15 years, the manuscripts were kept by Jean-Pierre Thibaudat, drama critic and former journalist for Release. He claimed a year ago to have been given them by one of his readers, whose identity he had not revealed.
Jean-Pierre Thibaudat had made contact with his daughter, Caroline Lanciano-Morandat, meeting a woman on the reserve: “She was afraid that her father would be called a thief. Which was absurd!” he tells Mediapart. “How could this man have stolen all this? What’s the point? It’s quite the opposite. He preserved these writings in a gesture of generosity and civility. When he contacted Céline to return them to him, he refused. For him, it was unbearable that a man like Morandat had kept all that, he could only have destroyed it. This is what he said in heaps of letters, so much did he want to remain in this victim posture which was characteristic of him. he says.
The sequel to Celine’s new releases, London is to be published on October 13 by Gallimard.