These 6,000 unpublished sheets had been abandoned by the writer and doctor considered a monument of literature, but also known for his violent anti-Semitism, when he fled France for Germany in June 1944.

Recovered by resistance fighters whose names remain secret, they fell in the 2000s to a former journalist, Jean-Pierre Thibaudat.

The latter, however, had to hand them over to the police and the writer's heirs, who revealed their existence in the summer of 2021.

Céline's publisher, the prestigious Gallimard house, publishes this novel of some 150 pages, plus illustrations and appendices.

The press is unanimous in hailing the event.

"The end of a mystery, the discovery of a great text", according to Le Point.

In the purest tradition of the Celinian novel, dark, nervous and raw, "War" opens with the awakening of Brigadier Ferdinand, 20, miraculously alive on a battlefield, in Poelkappelle (Belgium), one night in 1915 .

"Divine Surprise"

The writer tells how an English soldier saves him, then his convalescence not far from the front at Peurdu-sur-la-Lys (in reality Hazebrouck, in France), and finally a hasty departure for England.

The stay across the Channel will be the subject of another new, longer, "London", to be published in the fall.

"War" was probably written in 1934, shortly after the scandal of Céline's first novel, "Voyage au bout de la nuit" (1932).

A page from the original manuscript "War" by the writer Louis-Ferdinand Céline during the exhibition "Céline, the manuscripts found", on May 3, 2022 at the Galerie Gallimard in Paris Christophe ARCHAMBAULT AFP

The anti-Semitic turn, of which the writer will never repent, dates from 1937, with the publication of the pamphlet "Bagatelles pour un massacre".

At the end of 2017, Gallimard announced the publication of this pamphlet and its like, with critical apparatus.

The project fizzled out, for lack of "methodological and memory conditions (...) to consider it calmly", according to CEO Antoine Gallimard.

Now that this controversy has subsided, the reappearance of "War" and "London" makes it possible to celebrate a major work of French literature of the 20th century.

"These manuscripts arrive at the right time or by a divine surprise, as you want, so that Céline becomes a writer again: the one who matters, from 1932-1936", estimates Philippe Roussin, researcher specializing in Céline interviewed by AFP.

"Anthology Scenes"

The pamphleteer is unanimous against him.

But the novelist, whether we like his popular verve or not, occupies a place of choice in the history of the genre, for having shattered bourgeois literature, conventional narration and style, by translating the anguish of the 'between two wars.

Showing his trauma as a "hairy" (combatant soldier of the First World War), seriously injured, and his creative frenzy of the 1930s is the bias of the exhibition which opens Thursday at the Galerie Gallimard, "Céline, the manuscripts found".

A photo of the writer Louis-Ferdinand Céline and extracts from manuscripts exhibited at the Gallimard gallery, on May 3, 2022 in Paris Christophe ARCHAMBAULT AFP

Sheets are framed, including the first of "War", which ends with what should become a cult quote from Céline, emblematic of the obsessive hammering of the cannon in the story: "I caught the war in my head. It is locked in my head".

"There are anthology scenes and this constant presence of death, of the horror of the fighting that the war in Ukraine reminds us of today, but also of sex... For a first draft, the text is extremely strong," historian Pascal Fouché, who established the edition, told AFP.

The unpublished manuscript "War" by the writer Louis-Ferdinand Céline, two days before its publication, presented at the exhibition "Céline, the manuscripts found", on May 3, 2022 at the Galerie Gallimard in Paris Christophe ARCHAMBAULT AFP

Another quote, engraved on a wall: "They burned them, almost three manuscripts, the vigilante purifiers pests!".

This one, of a Céline who was enraged at having lost the fruit of his work, distorts reality.

The good state of conservation of the manuscripts in the following century proves it.

© 2022 AFP