The French author and diplomat Paul Louis Charles Claudel (1868-1955) is best known for his plays, in which he explored the relationship between man, the universe, and the divine in a highly poetic and original style.

Paul Claudel was one of a group of celebrated writers, all born about 1870, who gave French literature a new orientation. Though quite different from one another, Paul Valéry, Marcel Proust, André Gide, Charles Péguy, Colette, and Claudel all revolted against 19th-century positivism, as well as against the extremes of symbolism which denied reality to the external world. Each, in his own way, experimented with new ways of using the French language and offered new visions of the world and new views of the function of art.

Claudel was born on Aug. 6, 1868, at Villeneuve-sur-Fère-en-Tardenois on the border between the provinces of Champagne and the Ile-de-France. His family, of peasant and petit bourgeois stock, was Roman Catholic but not particularly devout. He received his early education in the various provincial towns where his father worked as a civil servant. In 1882 the family moved to Paris and enrolled young Paul in the famous lycée Louis-le-Grand. As a schoolboy, he was solitary and pessimistic and rebelled against the pervading philosophies of determinism and positivism, which denied man his free will and made him merely a product of his heredity and environment. He rejected his whole traditional literary education to take refuge in the poetry of Charles Baudelaire, Paul Verlaine, and especially Arthur Rimbaud, who was to be a lifelong source of inspiration. Rimbaud, he wrote later, revealed the supernatural to him and was in part responsible for his return to the Catholic faith, which he had abandoned.

Claudel's Conversion

While studying for a diplomatic career, Claudel underwent on Christmas Day 1886, in the Cathedral of Notre Dame, a profound mystical experience which was to shape his destiny. During the singing of the Magnificat, he suddenly knew that he believed in a living and personal God. His complete conversion and return to the Church were accomplished only after 4 years of study and spiritual struggle to reconcile the opposition between his intuition and his intellect.

This spiritual crisis is evident in Claudel's first works. Tête d' Or (1889), his only non-Christian play, is the tragedy of an adventurer who tries to find salvation solely through his own strength and intelligence and ignores an inner voice counseling humility. This play, like all that were to follow it, rejects all the conventions of the French theater, be they classical, romantic, or realistic. It offers a new conception of poetic drama in which psychology and logical dramatic action give way to symbolism and imaginative truth. The play also uses the completely original line of verse, known as the verset claudélien, in which Claudel wrote all his poems and plays. The rhythmic pattern of the lines of different lengths is intended to reproduce the natural breathing and heartbeat of the poet or actor in order to indicate the emotional intensity of the passage. In Claudel's second play, La Ville (1890), he sees the city, and eventually the entire world, as a single body, a maison fermée (closed house) in which each member is responsible for the salvation of the other members.

Diplomatic Career

In February 1893 Claudel received his first diplomatic post, as vice-consul in New York. From then until his retirement in 1935, he lived almost continuously outside France. He served as French ambassador to Japan (1921-1927), the United States (1927-1933), and Belgium (1933-1935).

Claudel's experiences outside France, and especially outside Europe, influenced his work and thought in many ways. His discovery of non-Western conceptions of the theater encouraged him to experiment with revolutionary and, at the time, largely misunderstood dramatic techniques. Most importantly, however, Claudel's travels throughout the world contributed a cosmic dimension to his Catholicism, rendering it often unacceptable to his more orthodox coreligionists.

Major Works

The moving religious drama Partage de Midi (1906) is partly based on an episode in Claudel's life that occurred in 1905, the year before his marriage. Like the hero of this play, after considerable spiritual anguish Claudel had rejected a religious vocation. He also fell in love with a young married woman and learned for the first time the meaning of great love, suffering, and sacrifice.

Claudel's long lyric poems Cinq Grandes Odes (1910) and La Cantate à trois voix (1931) are meditations on the relationship between the Creator and the created world, on the role of the poet, and on the function of love. These themes reappear in L'Annonce faite à Marie (1912; Tidings Brought to Mary), Claudel's best-known play. In a medieval setting, the apparent paradox of human relationships is resolved when Violaine, the heroine, reveals how love, separation, suffering, and even evil lead men to understand both their role in the salvation of others and also the divine order of the universe.

Le Soulier de satin (1929; The Satin Slipper), considered by many to be his greatest play, is a complicated and gigantic drama of the Renaissance, a period Claudel believed to be the beginning of a new era of Catholicism. Against a background of violence, conquest, and passion, the characters work out their destinies in a plot that reveals Claudel's characteristic themes: man's desire for the infinite, the limitations of human love, and the necessity of human love as an instrument of salvation.

Last Years

Claudel divided the last 20 years of his life between an apartment in Paris and his Château de Brangues. Although he wrote no more poems or plays, he composed lengthy reflections on various scriptural texts. During these years, when his plays were staged, he often attended rehearsals and made changes in his texts for the stage. In 1946 he was elected to the French Academy. He died in Paris on Feb. 23, 1955, and was accorded a state funeral at the Cathedral of Notre Dame before his burial at Brangues. He was survived by his widow, five children, and many grandchildren.

Further Reading

Jacques Madaule has made the most comprehensive study of Claudel to date. Especially recommended are three of his volumes, in French: Le Génie de Paul Claudel (1933; rev. ed. 1947), Le Drame de Paul Claudel (1936; rev. ed. 1964), and Claudel et le langage (1968). In English, Wallace Fowlie, Paul Claudel (1957), is an excellent short study. Joseph Chiari, The Poetic Drama of Paul Claudel (1954), is a sympathetic treatment of his theater. Recommended for general background material on modern French poetry and theater are Marcel Raymond, From Baudelaire to Surrealism (1950); Wallace Fowlie, A Guide to Contemporary French Literature: From Valéry to Sartre (1957); Roger Shattuck, The Banquet Years (1958; rev. ed. 1960); and Jacques Guicharnaud, Modern French Theatre from Giraudoux to Genet (1967).

Additional Sources

Chaigne, Louis, Paul Claudel: the man and the mystic, Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1978, 1961.

For more information on Paul-Louis-Charles-Marie Claudel, visit Britannica.com.

Claudel, Paul (1868-1955). French Catholic dramatist and poet who revived poetic drama in the modern period. Claudel is something of a paradox: reactionary in his religious and political ideas, he was nevertheless a constant innovator in his writings, building on contemporary trends in the theatre for a series of new and original departures. Too often dismissed as a religious bigot or a political backwoodsman, Claudel is best considered in literary terms, as a great dramatist and dramatic poet (his lyric poetry being at its best when sharing the rhetorical characteristics of his writing for the theatre, as in the Cinq grandes odes, published in 1910). His strange version of Catholic belief, often verging on the heretical, was particularly effective in producing dramatic situations of great power. One does not need to share his beliefs in order to appreciate the dilemmas involved.

He was born at Villeneuve-sur-Fère in 1868, of a middle-class family which moved to Paris in 1881, where Paul studied at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand. A Catholic by birth and upbringing, he nevertheless became strongly influenced by the contemporary pessimism based on Schopenhauer. A reading of Rimbaud in 1886 convinced him, however, of the existence of something beyond external reality. Influenced by what many have seen as a misreading of Rimbaud, he underwent a profound religious experience which was succeeded by four years of doubt and uncertainty, before his ‘conversion définitive’ in 1890.

Claudel's first poetry and drama were essentially Symbolist. To the vagueness and lack of definition of much of the Symbolist theatre, however, Claudel added two new elements: cores of symbolism (particularly Christian symbolism) around which a coherent meaning could establish itself; and a powerful voice based on the verset claudélien, free verse written for declamation and based on the breath group, as well as on biblical and liturgical techniques of repetition.

His first two plays, Tête d'or (written 1889, published 1890) and La Ville (written 1890, published 1893), already display this power. They are, however, large-scale, complicated plays in which the symbolism is still often rather confused. Much of this may have been caused by uncertainty of message. In Tête d'or, a Nietzschean desire for freedom and self-fulfilment stands alongside the Christian message; in La Ville, the symbolism of anarchism (destruction, purification) fits rather better with a Christian statement of the need for renewal. La Jeune Fille Violaine (written 1892, but not published until 1926) was a new departure, in that the main lines of the action are much simpler. The theme of this play, based on suffering and renunciation, is centrally Christian.

Claudel's diplomatic career (1893-1935) was often to influence his plays and poetry, which took much from the cultures that surrounded him. Vice-consul in New York and Boston (1893-4), he was posted as consul to China in 1895, where, apart from visits to France (1900-1 and 1905-6), he was to remain until 1909. Consul in Prague (1910-11) and Frankfurt (1911-13), consul-general in Hamburg (1913-14), he returned to France at the outbreak of war and performed missions in Rome (1915-16) and Rio de Janeiro (1917-19). After service in Denmark on the Schleswig Commission (1920-1), he became ambassador to Japan (1921-7), to the United States (1927-33), and to Belgium (1933-5).

His first posting in the United States produced L'Échange (written 1893, published 1900), in which American capitalism is a major theme. Restricted to four characters, it continued the new move to simplicity, which was reinforced when, between 1895 and 1898, he rewrote La Ville (this version being published in 1901), reducing the number of characters from 29 to 8. This, and the new version of La Jeune Fille Violaine (written between 1898 and 1900, published 1901), also show a move towards a more real primary action (as in L'Échange), with the symbolic meaning of events residing within a realistic cadre.

Partage de Midi (written 1905, published privately—150 copies—in 1906, and not properly published until 1948) is the climax of this trend. In it two lovers, conversing within the formulae of contemporary social discourse, become nevertheless aware of their mystical union on another plane. Transitions from one mode of existence to another are effected by mysterious incantatory phrases. What on one plane would appear a banal story of adultery becomes a cosmic drama.

The power of the emotions in this play is something new. Where, in the second La Ville for example, the heroine Lâla had moved from man to man because of symbolic necessity rather than human desire, in this play human desire is uppermost, and the symbolism is designed to explain it. The new immediacy appears to have been a result of Claudel's own experience. In 1900 he had returned to France from China to present himself for a monastic vocation, and had been refused. In disarray, on the boat back to China he started a passionate affair with a married woman, details from which were to colour most of his plays from now on. Partage is an expression of the conflict between Christian morality and the Romantic view of a predestined passion. Here the conflict is not resolved; within a few years, however, thanks to Claudel's reading of Huysmans, the doctrine of vicarious suffering, in an extreme form, was to become central to his work, and was to explain how the separation of suffering lovers could be efficacious in saving the world, with their love being part of God's plan. This explains the central role of such suffering in the Trilogy ( L'Otage, Le Pain dur and Le Père humilié), in the extensive reworking of La Jeune Fille Violaine entitled L' Annonce faite à Marie (written 1910-11, published 1912) and, above all, in Le Soulier de Satin (written 1919-24, published 1929).

This last play was a dramatic new departure. Influenced by all the new trends in European drama, and also drawing on the techniques of the Noh theatre observed during his period in Japan, Claudel turned his back on the conventions of realism in the theatre and produced a wide-ranging, disconcerting, humorous, tragic, universal drama which is like nothing else before or since. He was already making extensive use of music, and of modern media such as the cinema screen, to enhance his drama. Le Livre de Christophe Colomb (written 1927, published 1935) continued this trend, which culminated in the opera Jeanne au bûcher (written 1935, published 1939, music by Honegger).

A new career was to start with his collaboration with the actor-producer Jean-Louis Barrault. In 1943 they produced, on the Paris stage, a new version of the previously unperformed Soulier de Satin. Barrault's productions of Partage de Midi (1948), L'Échange (1951), Christophe Colomb (1953), and Tête d'or (1958) created a new realization of the theatrical power of Claudel's drama, and opened the way to a new generation of producers (Vitez, Lavelli, Bourdet) who have used Claudel as an incomparable resource.

[Richard Griffiths]

Bibliography

• A. Vachon, Le Temps et l'espace dans l'œuvre de Paul Claudel. (1965)
• F. Varillon, Claudel (1967)
• M. Lioure, L'Esthétique dramatique de Paul Claudel (1971)
• M. Malicet, Lecture psychanalytique de l'œuvre de Claudel, 3 vols. (1978-9)

(pōl klōdĕl') , 1868–1955, French dramatist, poet, and diplomat. He was ambassador to Tokyo (1921–27), Washington, D.C. (1927–33), and Brussels (1933–35). Claudel's writings deal largely with man's inner spirit, and reveal the influence of his profound and mystical Catholicism. His early plays were inspired by the French symbolists, notably by Rimbaud. Perhaps his finest play is L'Annonce faite à Marie (1912, tr. Tidings Brought to Mary, 1916). Among his other dramas is the lengthy Le Soulier de satin (1929, tr. The Satin Slipper, 1931). In his theatrical works Claudel combined extensive use of symbols—primarily religious—and exotic backgrounds with the techniques of pantomime, ballet, music, and the cinema. The rich lyric verse of Cinq Grandes Odes (1910) marks his highest poetic achievement. His prose works include Art poétique (1906) and writings on the Bible.

Bibliography

See B. L. Knapp, Paul Claudel (1982); A. Caranfa, Claudel: Beauty and Grace (1989).

Quotes:

"Intelligence is nothing without delight."

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