Reading Order
L'AnnonceL'Annonce faite à Marie Reading Order
L'Annonce faite à Marie (The Tidings Brought to Mary, 1912, revised 1948) by Paul Claudel is the major work of French Catholic theatre — a symbolic drama set in medieval France in which Violaine, a young woman who has kissed a leper out of pity, contracts leprosy and loses her beauty, her betrothed, and her place in the world, but through her suffering performs a miracle and eventually dies in sanctity. Claudel was the most important French poet-playwright of the Catholic tradition; his other major plays include Partage de midi (1906), the drama of an adulterous passion in the Far East that Claudel could not publish in his lifetime because it was autobiographical, and the monumental Le Soulier de satin (The Satin Slipper, 1924), a baroque drama of four days covering the entire Counter-Reformation world from Europe to the Americas to Japan, sometimes described as the greatest unperformable play in French literature. Claudel was also one of the major French poets of the twentieth century (Cinq Grandes Odes, 1910) and held senior diplomatic posts in China, Brazil, the United States, and Japan.
Where to start
Read L'Annonce faite à Marie first — it is the most accessible and most performed of Claudel's plays. Then read Partage de midi (in the 1948 revised version Claudel permitted to be performed) for the autobiographical passion play; and L'Échange (1901) for the earlier American drama. Le Soulier de satin is a lifetime's reading — approach it with the full text (not an abridgement) and plenty of time.
Complete L'Annonce Book List
- 1Buy
L'Annonce faite à Marie
Paul Claudel·1912·Start here — the accessible Catholic drama; the medieval miracle play; the most performed Claudel in France - 2Buy
Partage de midi
Paul Claudel·1906·The autobiographical passion play — suppressed in Claudel's lifetime; the four characters on a ship to China; the drama he could not admit was his own life - 3Buy
L'Échange
Paul Claudel·1901·The American drama — four characters: a French exile, his wife, an actress, and an American entrepreneur; an early masterpiece - 4Buy
Le Soulier de satin
Paul Claudel·1924·The Satin Slipper — the monumental baroque drama; four days covering the Counter-Reformation world; technically unperformable but read as a text - 5Buy
Cinq Grandes Odes
Paul Claudel·1910·Five Great Odes — the major poetry; Claudel's verse form (the verset); essential complement to the plays for understanding his artistic vision
L'Annonce — Frequently Asked Questions
What is the 'Annonciation' theme in L'Annonce faite à Marie?
The title refers both to the Annunciation (the Angel Gabriel's announcement to the Virgin Mary that she will bear Christ) and to the announcement of the play's central event — Violaine's kiss of the leper Pierre de Craon. The parallel is central to Claudel's meaning: as Mary accepted the annunciation that would bring her suffering and glory, Violaine accepts the annunciation of her suffering (leprosy, loss, death) as the condition of her sanctity. The play is structured as a typological allegory: every event in Violaine's life prefigures or parallels an event in the life of the Virgin or of Christ. Claudel's Catholicism is sacramental rather than sentimental — the physical suffering of the body is the means of spiritual redemption.
What is Le Soulier de satin and why is it so rarely performed?
Le Soulier de satin (The Satin Slipper, 1924) is a four-part drama covering the entire Counter-Reformation world — it takes place in Spain, Portugal, Africa, Japan, and the Americas, over a period covering the late sixteenth century to the early seventeenth, and involves hundreds of characters. Claudel himself estimated that a complete performance would take approximately twelve hours; it has been performed complete only a handful of times, most famously in a marathon 1943 Comédie-Française production directed by Jean-Louis Barrault. The play is one of the great monuments of Western dramatic literature, alongside Faust and Peer Gynt, but its scale makes it a work of reading rather than theatre-going for most people.
What was Paul Claudel's life as a diplomat?
Paul Claudel (1868–1955) was simultaneously one of the major French writers of the twentieth century and a senior French diplomat: he served as consul and ambassador in China (1895–1909), Prague, Frankfurt, Hamburg, Rio de Janeiro, Washington, and Tokyo. His diplomatic career gave him an unusually direct experience of non-European civilizations — the Chinese imagery in his poetry and plays is the result of direct observation, not orientalist fantasy — and also explains why many of his plays were written in diplomatic posts with no immediate prospect of performance. Claudel converted to Catholicism in 1886 (at the age of eighteen, at a Christmas Mass in Notre-Dame de Paris) and his entire subsequent life and work was shaped by this conversion.
How does Claudel relate to the Symbolist movement?
Claudel was a student of Mallarmé and was directly influenced by Symbolism, but his Catholicism took him in a direction the Symbolist movement could not follow. The Symbolist aesthetic — the poem as autonomous linguistic object, organized by sound and suggestion rather than meaning — was compatible with Claudel's formal innovations (the verset, the long unrhymed verse line that follows the rhythm of breath and thought) but incompatible with his Christian commitment to reference: the poem must refer to the real, because the real is God's creation and the poem is an act of praise. Claudel's formal innovation is Symbolist; his metaphysical commitment is Catholic; the combination is unique in French literary history.
Why is Claudel's reputation controversial?
Claudel's reputation is complicated by his political positions: his 1941 'Ode à Pétain,' which celebrated the Marshal as the providential savior of France, was widely cited after the Liberation as evidence of collaboration. Claudel defended himself by saying that he had retracted the ode when Vichy's nature became clear; the retraction was real but came late. His anti-Semitism — present in several of his wartime writings — is also a factor in the post-war assessment. His defenders argue that his artistic achievement (the plays, the poetry, the art criticism) should be evaluated separately from his political mistakes; his critics argue that the Catholic vision underlying the art is inseparable from the political conservatism.
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