Mea culpa

Céline had travelled to the USSR during the summer of 1936. Mea culpa, published soon after his return, belongs to a group of French "return from the USSR" books published in the same period, including André Gide's Retour de l'U.R.S.S. Unlike Gide, however, Céline had not gone to the Soviet Union as a committed communist intellectual who then abandoned the cause; his skepticism about political systems was already deeply established.

The pamphlet considers the discrepancy between Soviet promises of equality and the society Céline believed he had observed. He comments on differences in salaries and status, the condition of medical care, an extensive police presence, propaganda, and a governing hierarchy that he sees as having replaced rather than abolished older forms of inequality.

But the USSR gradually becomes an example for a much larger argument. Céline turns from communism to human nature itself. He argues that people continue to desire status, possessions, power, recognition and advantage regardless of the political structure placed around them.

The problem, in his formulation, is therefore not simply Stalinism or communism. It is the expectation that a political revolution can produce a fundamentally different kind of human being.

The text begins with the Soviet experiment and the promise that abolishing capitalist ownership will produce a more equitable society. Céline compares that promise with what he says he encountered during his trip.

He notes economic inequalities within Soviet society, contrasting highly paid professionals and officials with poorly paid workers. As a physician, he pays particular attention to hospitals and public health and presents the medical system as materially inadequate. He also describes bureaucracy, propaganda, political trials and extensive policing. Contemporary responses to Mea culpa particularly noticed these observations.

From there, the pamphlet shifts from reportage into philosophical argument. Céline maintains that removing private capital does not eliminate competition, selfishness, vanity, envy, hierarchy or the desire for privilege. The forms of power may change, in his view, but the impulses producing them remain.

He therefore rejects the expectation that collective ownership will automatically produce fraternity. Material prosperity is not enough either: Céline contrasts materialist political promises with older religious traditions that, in his interpretation, were more realistic about suffering and human imperfection.

Yet the text is not entirely reducible to misanthropy. Henri Godard has pointed out an important countercurrent: Céline also leaves room for a "fraternal feeling," a dimension of existence that cannot be produced mechanically by an economic system. Godard regards Mea culpa as a compact statement of Céline's anthropology at an important stage in his development.