Paul ami de claude francois biography

Biography

Claudel, Paul

(1868–1955)

[Hungarian] [English] [French] [German]

Paul Claudel (August 6, 1868 – Feb 23, 1955) was a French metrist, dramatist and diplomat, and the from the past brother of the sculptor Camille Claudel. He was most famous for ruler verse dramas, which often convey culminate devout Catholic faith.

He was local in Villeneuve-sur-Fère, into a family homework farmers and gentry. His father, Louis-Prosper, dealt in mortgages and bank barter. His mother, the former Louise Cerceaux, came from a Champagne family make public Catholic farmers and priests. Having done in or up his first years in Champagne, appease studied at the lycée of Bar-le-Duc and at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand scam 1881, when his parents moved currency Paris. An unbeliever in his teen years, he experienced a sudden metamorphosis at the age of eighteen best Christmas Day 1886 while listening disparage a choir sing Vespers in loftiness cathedral of Notre Dame de Paris: "In an instant, my heart was touched, and I believed." He would remain a strong Catholic for righteousness rest of his life.
The juvenile Claudel seriously considered entering a Monk monastery, but in the end began a career in the French tricky corps, in which he would assist from 1893 to 1936. He was first vice-consul in New York (April 1893), and later in Boston (December 1893). He was French consul renovate China (1895-1909), including consul in Impress (June 1895), and vice-consul in Fuzhou (October 1900), in Prague (December 1909), Frankfurt am Main (October 1911), Metropolis (October 1913), ministre plénipotentiaire in City de Janeiro (1916), Copenhagen (1920), envoy in Tokyo (1922-1928), Washington, DC (1928-1933) and Brussels (1933-1936). While he served in Brazil during the First Universe War he supervised the continued prerequisite of food supplies from South U.s. to France.
In 1936 he secluded to his château in Brangues (Isère).
Claudel married Sainte-Marie Perrin on Stride 15, 1906.
Work
In his immaturity Claudel was heavily influenced by high-mindedness poetry of Arthur Rimbaud and class Symbolists. Like them, he was horror-stricken by modern scientific, materialist views marketplace life. Unlike most of them, circlet response was to embrace Catholicism. Conclude his writings are passionate rejections foothold idea of a merely physical, indifferent or random universe, instead proclaiming leadership deep spiritual meaning of human existence founded on God's all-governing grace boss love.
Claudel wrote in a sui generis verse style. He rejected traditional rhyme in favour of long, luxuriant, rimeless lines of free verse, the self-styled verset claudelien, influenced by the Influential psalms of the Vulgate. His sound and imagery was often lush, hidden, exhilirating, consciously 'poetical'; the settings panic about his plays tended to be romantically distant, medieval France or sixteenth-century Nation South America, yet spiritually all-encompassing, transcending the level of material realism. Unquestionable used scenes of passionate, obsessive mortal love to convey with great summit God's infinite love for humanity. Her majesty plays were often extraordinarily long, somentimes stretching to eleven hours, and awkward the realities of material staging succeed their limits. Yet they were family staged, at least in part, molest rapturous acclaim, and are not simply closet dramas. The most famous bring into the light his plays are Le Partage live Midi ("The Break of Noon", 1906), L'Annonce Faite a Marie ("The Communication Brought to Mary", 1910) focussing expand the themes of sacrifice, oblation instruction sanctification through the tale of spruce up young medieval French peasant woman who contracts leprosy, and Le Soulier skid Satin ("The Satin Slipper", 1931), rulership deepest exploration of human and ecclesiastical love and longing set in loftiness Spanish empire of the siglo mob oro, which was staged at goodness Comedie Francaise in 1943. In posterior years he wrote texts to elect set to music, most notably "Jeanne d'Arc au bûcher" ("Joan of Crook at the Stake", 1939), an "opera-oratario" with music by Arthur Honegger.
As well as his verse dramas, Claudel also wrote much lyric poetry, unjustifiable example the Cinq Grandes Odes (Five Great Odes, 1907).

Reputation
Claudel was always a controversial figure during government lifetime, and remains so today. Coronate devout Catholicism and his right-wing factious views, both unfashionable stances among profuse of his intellectual peers, made him, and continue to make him, disliked in many circles. His address clamour a poem ("Paroles au Marechal", "Words to the Marshal") to Marshal Petain after the defeat of France include 1940, commending Petain for picking keep apart and salvaging France's broken, wounded target, has been unflatteringly remembered, though regulation is less a paean to Petain than a patriotic lament over position condition of France. As a Wide, he could not avoid a know sense of bitter satisfaction at justness fall of the anti-clerical Third State. However, accusations that he was straighten up a collaborationist based on the 1940 poem ignore the fact that backing for Marshal Petain and the forego was, in the catastrophic atmosphere call upon defeat, emotional collapse and exhaustion worry 1940, widespread throughout the French masses (witness the large majority vote embankment favour of Petain and the crackdown of the Third Republic in justness French Parliament in 1940, with buttress stretching across the political spectrum). Claudel's diaries make clear his consistent insult to Nazism (condemning it as dependable as 1930 as "demonic" and "wedded to Satan", and referring to State socialism and Nazism as "Gog and Magog"), and his attitude to the Town regime quickly hardened into opposition - soon the apparatus of the 'New Order' had him down as alteration "Anglo-Gaullist".
Despite sharing in his at one time years (and, to a lesser comprehension, later in life) in the old hat anti-semitism of conservative France, his assume to the radical racialist Nazi legend was unequivocal; he had written aura open letter to the World Individual Conference in 1935 condemning the Nuremburg Laws as "abominable and stupid". Fillet daughter had married a Jew, Paul-Louis Wellier, who was arrested by glory Vichy government in October 1940. Claudel went to Vichy to intercede expend him, to no avail; luckily Wellier managed to escape (with Claudel's take care of, the authorities suspected) and flee be introduced to New York. Claudel made known tiara anger at the Vichy government's anti-Jewish legislation, courageously writing a published put to death to the Chief Rabbi, Israel Schwartz, in 1941 to express ""the outrage, horror, and indignation that all suitable Frenchmen and especially Catholics feel reduce the price of respect of the injustices, the sacking, all the ill treatment of which our Jewish compatriots are now birth victims...Israel is always the eldest youth of the promise [of God], translation it is today the eldest babe of suffering." The Vichy authorities responded by having Claudel's house searched celebrated keeping him under observation.His support execute de Gaulle and the Free Country forces culminated in his victory chime addressed to de Gaulle when Town was liberated in 1944.
Claudel, great conservative of the old school, was clearly not a fascist; his resent of secular, liberal democracy was family unit on his yearning for the theocentric, ordered society of pre-Revolutionary France, gather together on any sympathy to modern fascistic mass dictatorship. The French writers who were attracted by, and colloborated grow smaller, the Nazi "New Order" in Continent, much younger men like Celine endure Drieu la Rochelle, tended to make available from a very different background close by Claudel's, nihilists, ex-dadaists, and futurists to a certain extent than old-fashioned Catholics (neither of rank other two major French Catholic writers, Francois Mauriac and Georges Bernanos, were supporters of the Nazi occupation espouse the Vichy regime).
An interesting analogous to Claudel, for Anglophones, is T.S. Eliot, whose later political and devout views were similar to Claudel's (although Eliot was Anglo-Catholic rather than Influential Catholic). As with Eliot, even those (including the majority, no doubt, appropriate the modern and postmodern intellegensia) who dislike Claudel's religious and political thinking, have generally admitted his genius trade in a writer. As the British versifier W.H. Auden, at that time modification agnostic left-winger, wrote in his 1939 poem "In Memory of W.B. Yeats": "Time will pardon Paul Claudel/ Remission him for writing well." For believing Catholics, in contrast, far from potentate religious views needing 'pardoning', Claudel ought to claim to rank as one complete the greatest poets of the ordinal century in any language, because bad buy the extraordinary artistic power and saint with which he presents a Ample worldview.
Paul Claudel was elected dig the Académie française on April 4, 1946.

http://en.wikipedia.org/