"War" comes from the famous manuscripts of Céline found and revealed to the general public in August 2021.

The novel will integrate the classic White collection, in an edition established by the historian Pascal Fouché and with a foreword by the lawyer François Gibault, executor of the writer and specialist in his work.

Gallimard mentions in his presentation of the book "a bundle of two hundred and fifty pages revealing a novel whose action takes place in Flanders during the Great War".

They contain a “first draft manuscript, written some two years after the publication of + Voyage au bout de la nuit +”, i.e. in 1934.

"Céline, between autobiographical story and work of imagination, lifts the veil on the central experience of her existence: the physical and moral trauma of the front", adds the publisher.

The future writer, 20 years old when the First World War broke out, remained marked all his life by the horrors of the fighting in the region of Ypres (Belgium) in 1914. He denounces in "War" an "international slaughterhouse in madness “, notes Gallimard.

“I have always slept like this in the excruciating noise since December 14. I caught the war in my head. It is locked in my head,” reads another excerpt leaked by the prestigious publishing house.

The story opens with the moment when "Brigadier Ferdinand" regains consciousness on a battlefield where he has been seriously wounded.

He follows his convalescence in a hospital where he befriends a nurse and a pimp, Bébert.

His fear, like that of all the wounded: having to return to battle.

He will escape it by being declared unfit and sent to London.

Other unreleased

The novelist, collaborationist and anti-Semite, had left this novel among a huge mass of papers when he left Paris for Germany in June 1944.

He then learned that his apartment had been visited and reported a theft.

But when he died in 1961 he did not know the culprits.

Their identity remains a mystery even today.

In 2020, a year after the death of Lucette Destouches, the widow of Céline, the journalist Jean-Pierre Thibaudat reported to the beneficiaries: he had held these manuscripts for fifteen years.

These beneficiaries, François Gibault and another close to "Ms. Céline", Véronique Robert-Chovin, did not wish to negotiate with him.

They recovered all of it, as the newspaper Le Monde was going to reveal in the summer of 2021.

Céline's publishing house is planning an exhibition entitled "Céline, the manuscripts found", at the Galerie Gallimard in Paris, from May 6 to July 16, of which the academic Alban Cerisier will be curator.

Two other unpublished works will follow in the fall, "London", the story of his departure for the British capital in 1915, which should be much longer than "War", and a medieval tale, "The Will of King Krogold".

Finally, in 2023, Gallimard intends to publish new editions of the novel "Casse-pipe", unfinished in its previously known edition, and of volume III of Céline's novels in the Pléiade Library.

In 2021, the CEO of the publishing house Antoine Gallimard said he wanted to establish all these editions "in a very scrupulous way", while Céline, despite the immense success that "Voyage au bout de la nuit" had earned her, had been reluctant to publish all these works.

© 2022 AFP