On June 14, 1957, Louis-Ferdinand Céline (1894–1961) gave an interview to the Paris weekly L’Express. L’Express, as Patrick McCarthy observes, was then a left-wing periodical and “had not yet been turned, by Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber, into a pale imitation of Time.” The interview left Céline open to charges of being a double traitor. In early 1950, while in Danish exile, he had been condemned to a year in prison for wartime collaboration. In June 1951, pardoned by an amnesty that applied to World War I veterans, he returned to France. There he renewed contacts with a band of unrepentant ex-collaborators whose mouthpiece was the Paris daily Rivarol. Several, including Lucien Rebatet and Pierre-Antoine Cousteau, had served prison terms. Rebatet, a former music and film critic, spent the war years on the staff of the collaborationist paper Je suis partout. In 1942 he publish ...

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