Editing Paul Claudel (section)

==Views and reputation==
Claudel was a conservative of the old school, sharing the [[antisemitism]] of conservative France. He addressed a poem ("Paroles au Maréchal," "Words to the Marshal") after the defeat of France in 1940, commending [[Marshal Pétain]] for picking up and salvaging France's broken, wounded body. As a Catholic, he could not avoid a sense of satisfaction at the fall of the [[anti-clerical]] [[French Third Republic]].

His diaries make clear his consistent contempt for Nazism (condemning it as early as 1930 as "demonic" and "wedded to Satan," and referring to [[communism]] and [[Nazism]] as "[[Gog and Magog]]"). He wrote an open letter to the World Jewish Conference in 1935, condemning the [[Nuremberg Laws]] as "abominable and stupid." His support for [[Charles de Gaulle]] and the Free French forces culminated in his victory ode addressed to de Gaulle when Paris was liberated in 1944.

The British poet [[W. H. Auden]] acknowledged the importance of Paul Claudel in his poem "In Memory of W. B. Yeats" (1939). Writing about Yeats, Auden says in lines 52–55 (from the originally published version, then excised by Auden in a later revision):

{{quote|<poem>Time that with this strange excuse
Pardoned Kipling and his views,
And will pardon Paul Claudel,
Pardons him for writing well
</poem>}}

[[George Steiner]], in ''The Death of Tragedy'', called Claudel one of the three "masters of drama" in the 20th century, with [[Henry de Montherlant]] and [[Bertolt Brecht]].<ref>{{cite book |last1=Steiner |first1=George |title=The Death of Tragedy |date=1 January 1996 |publisher=Yale University Press |isbn=978-0-300-06916-7 |page=xii |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=ZA3_bYqHOegC&pg=PR12 |language=en}}</ref>