His address of a poem ("Paroles au Maréchal," "Words to the Marshal") to Marshal Philippe Pétain after the defeat of France in 1940, commending Petain for picking up and salvaging France's broken, wounded body, has been unflatteringly remembered, though it is less a paean to Pétain than a patriotic lament over the condition of France. As a Catholic, he could not avoid a sense of satisfaction at the fall of the anti-clerical French Third Republic. However, accusations that he was a collaborationist based on the 1941 poem ignore the fact that support for Marshal Pétain and the surrender was, in the catastrophic atmosphere of defeat, emotional collapse and exhaustion in 1941, widespread throughout the French populace (witness the large majority vote in favour of Pétain and the dissolution of the Third Republic in the French Parliament in 1940, with support stretching across the political spectrum). Claudel's 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"), and his attitude to the Vichy regime quickly hardened into opposition.