Paul (Louis Charles Marie) Claudel - Work, Reputation

Catholic poet, essayist, and playwright, born in Villeneuve-sur-Fin, France. A convert at the age of 18, he joined the diplomatic service, and held posts in many parts of the world. His plays, such as L'Annonce faite à Marie (1912, The Annunciation to Mary) and his poetry, such as Cinq grandes odes (1910, Five Great Odes), are remarkable for their spiritual intensity.

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Paul Claudel (August 6, 1868 – February 23, 1955) was a French poet, dramatist and diplomat, and the younger brother of the sculptor Camille Claudel.

The young Claudel seriously considered entering a Benedictine monastery, but in the end began a career in the French diplomatic corps, in which he would serve from 1893 to 1936. (His secretaries during the Brazil mission included Darius Milhaud, later world-famous as a composer.) In 1930, Claudel received a LL.D.

Claudel married Sainte-Marie Perrin on March 15, 1906.

Work

In his youth Claudel was heavily influenced by the poetry of Arthur Rimbaud and the Symbolists.

Claudel wrote in a unique verse style. The most famous of his plays are Le Partage de Midi ("The Break of Noon", 1906), L'Annonce Faite a Marie ("The Tidings Brought to Mary", 1910) focussing on the themes of sacrifice, oblation and sanctification through the tale of a young medieval French peasant woman who contracts leprosy, and Le Soulier de Satin ("The Satin Slipper", 1931), his deepest exploration of human and divine love and longing set in the Spanish empire of the siglo de oro, which was staged at the Comedie Francaise in 1943.

As well as his verse dramas, Claudel also wrote much lyric poetry, for example the Cinq Grandes Odes (Five Great Odes, 1907).

Reputation

Claudel was always a controversial figure during his lifetime, and remains so today. However, accusations that he was a collaborationist based on the 1940 poem ignore the fact that support for Marshal Petain and the surrender was, in the catastrophic atmosphere of defeat, emotional collapse and exhaustion in 1940, widespread throughout the French populace (witness the large majority vote in favour of Petain and the dissolution of the Third Republic in the French Parliament in 1940, with support stretching across the political spectrum). Claudel's diaries make clear his consistent contempt to Nazism (condemning it as early as 1930 as "demonic" and "wedded to Satan", and referring to Communism and Nazism as "Gog and Magog"), and his attitude to the Vichy regime quickly hardened into opposition.

Despite sharing in his earlier years (and, to a lesser extent, later in life) in the old-fashioned anti-semitism of conservative France, his response to the radical racialist Nazi version was unequivocal; Claudel made known his anger at the Vichy government's anti-Jewish legislation, courageously writing a published letter to the Chief Rabbi, Israel Schwartz, in 1941 to express ""the disgust, horror, and indignation that all decent Frenchmen and especially Catholics feel in respect of the injustices, the despoiling, all the ill treatment of which our Jewish compatriots are now the victims...Israel is always the eldest son of the promise [of God], as it is today the eldest son of suffering."

Claudel, a conservative of the old school, was clearly not a fascist; The French writers who were attracted by, and colloborated with, the Nazi "New Order" in Europe, much younger men like Celine and Drieu la Rochelle, tended to come from a very different background to Claudel's, nihilists, ex-dadaists, and futurists rather than old-fashioned Catholics (neither of the other two major French Catholic writers, Francois Mauriac and Georges Bernanos, were supporters of the Nazi occupation or the Vichy regime).

An interesting parallel to Claudel, for Anglophones, is T.S. Eliot, whose later political and religious views were similar to Claudel's. As with Eliot, even those (including the majority, no doubt, of the modern and postmodern intellegentsia) who dislike Claudel's religious and political beliefs, have generally admitted his genius as a writer. Auden, at that time an agnostic left-winger, acknowledged the importance of Paul Claudel in his famous poem "In Memory of W.B.

For believing Catholics, in contrast, far from his religious views needing 'pardoning', Claudel must claim to rank as one of the greatest poets of the twentieth century in any language, because of the extraordinary artistic power and beauty with which he presents a Catholic worldview.

Paul Claudel was elected at the Académie française on April 4, 1946. "Paul Claudel", in The Fontana Biographical Companion to Modern Thought, eds. http://www.paul-claudel.net/ Ashley, Tim "Evil Genius", The Guardian, August 14th, 2004, http://www.guardian.co.uk/arts/critic/feature/0,1169,1282766,00.html Price-Jones, David, "Jews, Arabs and French Diplomacy: A Special Report", Commentary, May 22, 2005, http://www.benadorassociates.com/article/15043 Britannica Student Encyclopedia, "Paul Claudel", http://0-www.search.eb.com.library.uor.edu/ebi/article-9319794?query=salvation&ct=ebi

Preceded by: Louis Gillet

Seat 13 Académie française 1946–1955

Succeeded by: Wladimir d'Ormesson