Léon Bloy was a French

France

The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...

 novel

Novel

A novel is a book of long narrative in literary prose. The genre has historical roots both in the fields of the medieval and early modern romance and in the tradition of the novella. The latter supplied the present generic term in the late 18th century....

ist, essay

Essay

An essay is a piece of writing which is often written from an author's personal point of view. Essays can consist of a number of elements, including: literary criticism, political manifestos, learned arguments, observations of daily life, recollections, and reflections of the author. The definition...

ist, pamphleteer and poet

Poetry

Poetry is a form of literary art in which language is used for its aesthetic and evocative qualities in addition to, or in lieu of, its apparent meaning...

.

Biography

Bloy was born in Notre-Dame-de-Sanilhac

Notre-Dame-de-Sanilhac

Notre-Dame-de-Sanilhac is a commune in the Dordogne department in Aquitaine in southwestern France.-Population:-References:*...

, in the arondissement of Périgueux

Périgueux

Périgueux is a commune in the Dordogne department in Aquitaine in southwestern France.Périgueux is the prefecture of the department and the capital of the region...

, Dordogne

Dordogne

Dordogne is a départment in south-west France. The départment is located in the region of Aquitaine, between the Loire valley and the High Pyrénées named after the great river Dordogne that runs through it...

. He was the second of six sons of Voltaire

Voltaire

François-Marie Arouet , better known by the pen name Voltaire , was a French Enlightenment writer, historian and philosopher famous for his wit and for his advocacy of civil liberties, including freedom of religion, free trade and separation of church and state...

an freethinker

Freethought

Freethought is a philosophical viewpoint that holds that opinions should be formed on the basis of science, logic, and reason, and should not be influenced by authority, tradition, or other dogmas...

 and stern disciplinarian Jean Baptiste Bloy and his wife Anne-Marie Carreau, pious Spanish-Catholic daughter of a Napoleonic soldier. After an agnostic and unhappy youth in which he cultivated an intense hatred for the Roman Catholic Church

Roman Catholic Church

The Catholic Church, also known as the Roman Catholic Church, is the world's largest Christian church, with over a billion members. Led by the Pope, it defines its mission as spreading the gospel of Jesus Christ, administering the sacraments and exercising charity...

 and its teaching, his father found him a job in Paris, where he went in 1864. In December 1868, he met the aging Catholic author Barbey d'Aurevilly, who lived opposite him in rue Rousselet and became his mentor. Shortly afterwards, he underwent a dramatic religious conversion.

Bloy's works reflect a deepening devotion to the Catholic Church and most generally a tremendous craving for the Absolute. His devotion to religion resulted in a complete dependence on charity; he acquired his nickname ("the ungrateful beggar") as a result of the many letters requesting financial aid from friends, acquaintances, and complete strangers, all the while carrying on with his literary work, in which his eight-volume Diary takes an important place.

Bloy was a friend of the author Joris-Karl Huysmans

Joris-Karl Huysmans

Charles-Marie-Georges Huysmans was a French novelist who published his works as Joris-Karl Huysmans . He is most famous for the novel À rebours...

, the painter Georges Rouault

Georges Rouault

Georges Henri Rouault[p] was a French Fauvist and Expressionist painter, and printmaker in lithography and etching.-Childhood and education:Rouault was born in Paris into a poor family...

, and the philosopher Jacques Maritain

Jacques Maritain

Jacques Maritain was a French Catholic philosopher. Raised as a Protestant, he converted to Catholicism in 1906. An author of more than 60 books, he helped to revive St. Thomas Aquinas for modern times and is a prominent drafter of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights...

, and was instrumental in reconciling these intellectuals with Roman Catholicism. However, he acquired a reputation for bigotry because of his frequent outbursts of temper; and his first novel, Le Désespéré, a fierce attack on rationalism

Rationalism

In epistemology and in its modern sense, rationalism is "any view appealing to reason as a source of knowledge or justification" . In more technical terms, it is a method or a theory "in which the criterion of the truth is not sensory but intellectual and deductive"...

 and those he believed to be in league with it, made him fall out with the literary community of his time and even many of his old friends. Soon, Bloy could count such prestigious authors as Emile Zola

Émile Zola

Émile François Zola was a French writer, the most important exemplar of the literary school of naturalism and an important contributor to the development of theatrical naturalism...

, Guy de Maupassant

Guy de Maupassant

Henri René Albert Guy de Maupassant was a popular 19th-century French writer, considered one of the fathers of the modern short story and one of the form's finest exponents....

, Ernest Renan

Ernest Renan

Ernest Renan was a French expert of Middle East ancient languages and civilizations, philosopher and writer, devoted to his native province of Brittany...

, Alphonse Daudet

Alphonse Daudet

Alphonse Daudet was a French novelist. He was the father of Léon Daudet and Lucien Daudet.- Early life :Alphonse Daudet was born in Nîmes, France. His family, on both sides, belonged to the bourgeoisie. The father, Vincent Daudet, was a silk manufacturer — a man dogged through life by misfortune...

, Joris-Karl Huysmans, Paul Bourget

Paul Bourget

Paul Charles Joseph Bourget , was a French novelist and critic.-Biography:He was born in Amiens in the Somme département of Picardie, France. His father, a professor of mathematics, was later appointed to a post in the college at Clermont-Ferrand, where Bourget received his early education...

 and Anatole France

Anatole France

Anatole France , born François-Anatole Thibault, , was a French poet, journalist, and novelist. He was born in Paris, and died in Saint-Cyr-sur-Loire. He was a successful novelist, with several best-sellers. Ironic and skeptical, he was considered in his day the ideal French man of letters...

 as his enemies.

In addition to his published works, he left a large body of correspondence with public and literary figures. He died in Bourg-la-Reine

Bourg-la-Reine

Bourg-la-Reine is a commune in the southern suburbs of Paris, France. It is located from the center of Paris. The inhabitants are called Réginaburgiens. The town is twinned with Kenilworth, UK.-History:...

.

Influence

Bloy is quoted in the epigraph at the beginning of Graham Greene

Graham Greene

Henry Graham Greene, OM, CH was an English author, playwright and literary critic. His works explore the ambivalent moral and political issues of the modern world...

's novel The End of the Affair

The End of the Affair

The End of the Affair is a novel by British author Graham Greene, as well as the title of two feature films that were adapted for the screen based on the novel....

, and in the essay "The Mirror of Enigmas", by the Argentine writer, Jorge Luis Borges

Jorge Luis Borges

Jorge Francisco Isidoro Luis Borges Acevedo , known as Jorge Luis Borges , was an Argentine writer, essayist, poet and translator born in Buenos Aires. In 1914 his family moved to Switzerland where he attended school, receiving his baccalauréat from the Collège de Genève in 1918. The family...

, who acknowledged his debt to him by naming him in the Foreword to his short story collection "Artifices" as one of seven authors who were in "the heterogeneous list of the writers I am continually re-reading". In his novel The Harp and the Shadow, Alejo Carpentier

Alejo Carpentier

Alejo Carpentier y Valmont was a Cuban novelist, essayist, and musicologist who greatly influenced Latin American literature during its famous "boom" period. Born in Lausanne, Switzerland, Carpentier grew up in Havana, Cuba; and despite his European birthplace, Carpentier strongly self-identified...

 excoriates Bloy as a raving, Columbus

Christopher Columbus

Christopher Columbus was an explorer, colonizer, and navigator, born in the Republic of Genoa, in northwestern Italy. Under the auspices of the Catholic Monarchs of Spain, he completed four voyages across the Atlantic Ocean that led to general European awareness of the American continents in the...

-defending lunatic during Vatican deliberations over the explorer's canonization. Bloy is also quoted at the beginning of John Irving

John Irving

John Winslow Irving is an American novelist and Academy Award-winning screenwriter.Irving achieved critical and popular acclaim after the international success of The World According to Garp in 1978...

's A Prayer for Owen Meany

A Prayer for Owen Meany

A Prayer for Owen Meany was the seventh published novel by American writer John Irving when it appeared in 1989. It tells the story of John Wheelwright and his best friend Owen Meany growing up together in a small New England town during the 1950-60s...

, and there are several quotations from his Letters to my Fiancée in Charles Williams's anthology The New Christian Year. Le Désespéré was republished in 2005 by Editions Underbahn

Éditions Underbahn

Éditions Underbahn is an American publishing house created in 2005 and specialized in French language neoconservative texts.- Fiction :* Le Désespéré, Léon Bloy, preface by Maurice G...

 with a preface by Maurice G. Dantec.

Novels

• Le Désespéré (1887) ("Despairing")
• La Femme pauvre (1897) ("The woman who was poor")

Essays

• Propos d'un entrepreneur de démolitions (1884) ("The Munition Merchant's Plan")
• Le Salut par les Juifs (1892) ("Salvation through the Jews")
• Je m'accuse (1900) ("I accuse myself")
• Exégèse des lieux communs (1902–1912) ("Exegesis of the Commonplaces")
• Belluaires et porchers (1905) ("Gladiators and swineherds")
• Celle qui pleure (1908) ("The crying one")
• Le Sang du Pauvre (1909) ("Blood of the Poor")
• L'Ame de Napoléon (1912) ("Napoleon's Soul")
• Jeanne d'Arc et l'Allemagne (1915) ("Joan of Arc and Germany")

Short stories

• Sueur de sang (1893) ("Sweating blood")
• Histoires désobligeantes (1894) ("Disagreeable tales")

Diaries

• Le Mendiant ingrat (1898) ("The Ungrateful Beggar")
• Mon Journal (1904) ("My diary")
• Quatre ans de captivité à Cochons-sur-Marne (1905) ("Four years of captivity in Cochons-sur-Marne")
• L'Invendable (1909) ("The Unsaleable")
• Le Vieux de la montagne (1911) ("The Old Man from the Mountain")
• Le Pèlerin de l'Absolu (1914) ("The Pilgrim of the Absolute")
• Au seuil de l'Apocalypse (1916) ("On the Threshold of the Apocalypse")
• La Porte des humbles (posth., 1920) ("The Door of the Lowly")

A useful study in English is Léon Bloy by Rayner Heppenstall

Rayner Heppenstall

John Rayner Heppenstall was a British novelist, poet, diarist, and a BBC radio producer.-Early life:...

(Cambridge: Bowes & Bowes, 1953).

External links