Crime in Claudel's “Le Pain Dur”: A Legal Perspective

The French diplomat and dramatist Paul Claudel (1868-1955) began his career as a member of the Symbolist movement during the late 19th century, and his theater reflects this origin in its essentially poetic character. Claudel rejected traditional, realistic psychology in his plays, utilized free verse, and emphasized the spiritual dimension of man's search for meaning. Yet this poetic approach did not prevent him from dealing with some of the most brutal and elemental impulses in the human psyche. In particular, the themes of death, crime, and usurpation figure prominently throughout his theater.1 His Trilogy, composed between 1908 and 1916, traces the fortunes of three generations of the Turelure-CoOfontaine family, from the French Revolution to the Second Empire. Unlike most of Claudel's other plays, the Trilogy is a relatively realistic work, which vividly depicts the bitter physical and emotional struggle for dominance and satisfaction among the family members. The themes of death and usurpation play an important role in all three of its parts. I focus here on the second play of the Trilogy, Le Pain dur,2 the most violent and somber of the three plays, and on the problems of criminal law raised by the events it describes. The central event is an act of murder, and it is prepared and carried out along the lines of classic criminal behavior. Thus a legal analysis, with its vocabulary, logical structure, and tools of behavioral and ethical evaluation, can help to clarify the complex aesthetic structure of the work. If, by treating a fictional crime according to the "rules" of a real legal system, I momentarily take it out of the realm of pure literary imagination and freedom and situate it in the "real world," I eventually return to the representational domain of Claudel's imagination. Indeed, the two domains, the legal and the literary, are in fact closer than they might appear. The legalistic criteria are