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Hilaire Belloc

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Photograph of Belloc
Photograph of Belloc

Joseph Hilaire Pierre René Belloc (July 27, 1870–July 16, 1953) was one of the most prolific writers in England during the early twentieth century. His style and personality during later life complemented the nickname he received in childhood, "Old Thunder."

One of Belloc's most famous statements was "the faith is Europe and Europe is the faith"; this sums up his strongly-held, orthodox Roman Catholic views, and the cultural conclusions he drew from them, which were expressed at length in many of his works from the period 1920-1940. These are still cited as exemplary of Catholic apologetics. They have also been criticised, for instance by comparison with the work of Christopher Dawson during the same period.

With men such as G.K. Chesterton, Belloc envisioned the socioeconomic system of Distributism, based on the social teaching of the Roman Catholic Church and the encyclical Rerum Novarum by Pope Leo XIII.

Recent biographies of Belloc have been written by A. N. Wilson and Joseph Pearce.

Contents

Life

Belloc was born in La Celle-Saint-Cloud France (next to Versailles and near Paris) to a French father and English mother, and grew up in England. He was the brother of the novelist Marie Adelaide Belloc Lowndes. His mother Bessie Rayner Parkes (1829-1925) was also a writer, and a great-grand-daughter of the English chemist Joseph Priestley. She married Louis Belloc in 1867. Five years after they wed, Louis died in 1872.

Hilaire Belloc knew from an early age Henry Edward Cardinal Manning, who was responsible for the conversion of his mother to Roman Catholicism. Manning's involvement in the 1889 London Dock Strike made a major impression on Belloc and his view of politics, according to biographer Robert Speaight. Belloc described this retrospectively in The Cruise of the Nona (1925); he became a trenchant critic both of unbridled capitalism, and of many aspects of socialism.

After being educated at the Oratory School Belloc served his term of military service, as a French citizen, with an artillery regiment near Toul in 1891. He was powerfully built, with great stamina, and walked extensively in Britain and Europe. While courting his future wife Elodie, whom he first met in 1890, the impecunious Belloc walked a good part of the way from the midwest of the United States to her home in northern California, paying for lodging at remote farm houses and ranches by sketching the owners and reciting poetry. He was later a well known yachtsman.

An 1895 graduate of Balliol College, Oxford, Belloc went into politics after he became a naturalised British citizen. At the Oxford Union he held his own in debates with F. E. Smith and John Buchan, the latter a friend. Sir John Simon who was a contemporary at Oxford, described his "...resonant, deep pitched voice..." as making an "...unforgettable impression". A great disappointment in his life was his failure to gain a fellowship at All Souls College in Oxford.

He was a Liberal Party Member of Parliament from 1906 to 1910, but swiftly became disillusioned with party politics. He then wrote on myriad subjects, from warfare to poetry and many topics current in his day. He was closely associated with G. K. Chesterton; George Bernard Shaw coined the term Chesterbelloc for their partnership.

His only period of steady employment was from 1914 to 1920 as editor of Land and Water, a journal devoted to the progress of the war. Otherwise he lived by his pen, and often felt short of money. He was brilliant, but a poor listener. His larger-than-life personality, and strongly held views, were more acceptable to some in small doses. His setbacks in the academic and political worlds lent asperity to his writing.

Belloc suffered a stroke in 1941, and never recovered from its effects. He lived quietly at home until his death in 1953.

His estate was probated at 7,451 pounds sterling.

Writing

See Hilaire Belloc's books for a chronological list of work by Belloc

His best travel writing and his works for children have secured a permanent following. The Path to Rome (1902), an account of a walking trip he took from central France to Rome, has remained continuously in print.

As an essayist he was one of a small, admired and dominant group (with Chesterton, E. V. Lucas and Robert Lynd) of popular writers. In the large he sometimes came across as too opinionated, and too dedicated a Catholic controversialist. He was at his most effective in the 1920s, on the attack against H. G. Wells's Outline of History; but tended to come off worse in crossing swords with academics.

His "cautionary tales", humorous poems with a moral, are the most widely known of his writings:

Henry King
Who chewed bits of string and was early cut off in dreadful agonies
The Chief Defect of Henry King
Was chewing little bits of String.
At last he swallowed some which tied
Itself in ugly Knots inside.
Physicians of the Utmost Fame
Were called at once; but when they came
They answered, as they took their Fees,
"There is no Cure for this Disease.
Henry will very soon be dead."
His Parents stood about his Bed
Lamenting his Untimely Death,
When Henry, with his Latest Breath,
Cried - "Oh, my Friends, be warned by me,
That Breakfast, Dinner, Lunch and Tea
Are all the Human Frame Requires..."
With that the Wretched Child expires.
Another similar poem tells the story of “Rebecca, who slammed doors for fun and perished miserably.”

The tale of Matilda (who told lies and was burnt to death) was adapted into the play "Matilda Liar!" by Debbie Isitt. Quentin Blake, the illustrator, described Belloc as at one and the same time the overbearing adult and mischievous child. Roald Dahl is a follower at an unsafe distance. But Belloc has broader if sourer scope:

It happened to Lord Lundy then
as happens to so many men
about the age of 26
they shoved him into politics...
leading up to

we had intended you to be
the next Prime Minister but three...
He wrote a long series of contentious biographies of historical figures, including Oliver Cromwell, James II, and Napoleon. Two of his best known non-fiction works are The Servile State (1912) and Europe and Faith (1920). They show him as an ardent proponent of orthodox Catholicism and a critic of many elements of the modern world. In The Servile State, and in many other works, Belloc criticized the modern economic order, advocating instead a theory known as distributism in opposition to both capitalism and socialism.

He wrote one of the alternative history stories/essays for the 1932 collection If It Had Happened Otherwise edited by Sir John Squire.

Ignatius Press of California has been reissuing Belloc.

Belloc and Politics

Belloc was strongly opposed to both capitalism and its alternative socialism, and so, with other English Catholic luminaries of his day, came up with a third way, based on the social teaching of the Catholic Church, which they called Distributism.

Belloc and accusations of anti-Semitism

For fuller discussion, see section in G. K.'s Weekly

Belloc has been charged with anti-Semitism, and the issue of his attitude to Jews is still raised. For example, Norman Rose's book The Cliveden Set (2000) poses the question of whether Nancy Astor (see Cliveden set, for the context), a friend of Belloc's in the 1930s until they broke over religious matters, was influenced by him against Jews in general. Rose asserts that Belloc 'was moved by a deep vein of hysterical anti-Semitism'. He was repeatedly critical, from his days in politics onwards, of the influence some Jewish people had on society and the world of finance. He is, however, consistently defended by some as not an anti-Semite.

There are a number of grounds on which Belloc has been deemed by some to be anti-Semitic and not concerned to conceal his views. A. N. Wilson's biography expresses the opinion that Belloc had a tendency to allude to Jews in conversation, in a seemingly obsessive fashion on occasion. Anthony Powell's review of that biography contains Powell's opinion, that Belloc was thoroughly anti-Semitic, except at a personal level.

Canadian broadcaster Michael Coren wrote:

Belloc's polemics did periodically drift into the realms of bigotry, but he was invariably a tenacious opponent of philosophical anti-Semitism, ostracized friends who made attacks upon individual Jews, and was an inexorable enemy of fascism and all its works, speaking out against German anti-Semitism before the National Socialists came to power.

Belloc trivia

References

External links

Online editions of his works

Other sites

 

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