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 published Les Décombres, a powerful, bitter novel that blamed all France’s woes on the Popular Front, the Jews, and left-wing intellectuals like André Malraux. Paying that sincerest of compliments, Rebatet wrote his novel in the frenetically impressionistic style of Céline. Cousteau, another Je suis partoutstaffer, had declared during the occupation that some collabo dailies were pressured by German censorship into adopting an anti-Semitic and pro-fascist position. By contrast, he and his colleagues were “just plain fascists and we would be the same even if all kinds of censorship were abolished.”

The Express interview came as a bitter pill to the