Paul Claudel(1868-1955)

French writer Paul Claudel was born in the small French village of Villeneuve-sur-Fere-en-Tardenois in 1868. His father was a banker, Young Paul attended a variety of private tutors and and later attended provincial schools. When he was 13 his family moved to Paris, where his sister--who had previously moved there--was studying sculpture under Auguste Rodin. Paul attended law school in Paris and studied political science at another school. In 1886 he read his first volume of poetry by Arthur Rimbaud and, as he later said, "I had a revelation of the supernatural". Although his mother came from a family of Catholic farmers and priests, Claudel himself was not religious. However, shortly after his "supernatural" experience reading Rimbaud, he formally embraced the Catholic religion.

In 1890 he took and passed the examinations required for entrance into the French diplomatic service, and in 1893 he was appointed consular assistant in New York, followed a year later as consul pro tem in Boston, MA. From 1894-1909 he served as vice-consul and/or consul in the Chinese cities of Fuchow, Shanghai, Peking, Hankow and Tientsin. In 1906, while on a vacation in France, he met and married Reine Sanite-Marie Perrin, the daughter of a Lyons architect. He took her back to his posting in China, where their first son was soon born. Claudel had begun his writing career some time before his service in the diplomatic corps--he published (although anonymously) his first drama, "Tete d'Or", in 1893, but in 1900 he used his own name on his next book, "The East I Knew". He published a collection of plays under the title "L'Arbre", although none of the plays were actually produced until some years later.

In 1909 he was posted as consul in Prague, in 1911 in Frankfurt, Germany, and in 1914 to Hamburg, Germany. Upon the outbreak of war he was transferred to Rome, Italy, as financial attache, and was soon posted to Brazil as Minister Plenipotentiary. His secretary there was the composer Darius Milhaud, who set many of Claudel's poems to music, and in 1929 he composed the score for Claudel's opera "The Book of Christopher Columbus", which premiered at the Berlin (Germany) Opera House. He didn't give up his diplomatic career, however. He was appointed Ambassador to Japan in 1921, a position he held for four years, then as ambassador to the US (1926-33) and Belgium (1933-35). When World War II broke out he was given a top job in the French Ministry of Propaganda.

Claudel has cited William Shakespeare, Dante Alighieri, Aeschylus and Fyodor Dostoevsky as major influences on is writing, but has always given credit to Rimbaud as his main inspiration. His personal reputation suffered somewhat because during the World War II occupation of France by the Germans, Claudel supported the collaborationist Vichy government at first, but soon became a fierce opponent. His daughter-in-law's sister had married a Jew, Paul Weiller, who was arrested by Vichy authorities in 1940. Although Claudel could not get them to drop charges against Weiller, he managed to escape to New York (the Vichy police suspected Claudel of aiding him). When Claudel published a scathing letter in 1941 excoriating the Vichy regime for its collaboration in the brutal treatment of French Jews, the authorities searched Claudel's house for "subversive" documents and kept him under constant surveillance. When France was finally liberated in 1944, Claudel wrote a victory ode addressed to Gen. Charles de Gaulle.

Paul Claudel died in Paris, France, on Feb. 23, 1955.