Léon Bloy

• Born — 11 July 1846 • Birthplace — Notre-Dame-de-Sanilhac, Kingdom of France • Died — 3 November 1917 • Place of death — Bourg-la-Reine, French Republic • Occupation — * Novelist • essayist • poet

Bloy was born on 11 July 1846 in Notre-Dame-de-Sanilhac, in the arondissement of Périgueux, Dordogne. He was the second of six sons of Jean-Baptiste Bloy, a Voltairean freethinker, and Anne-Marie Carreau, a stern disciplinarian and pious Spanish-Catholic daughter of a Napoleonic soldier. After an agnostic and unhappy youth in which he cultivated an intense hatred for the Catholic Church 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 who became his mentor. Shortly afterwards, he underwent a dramatic religious conversion and was received into the Catholic Church. Bloy was a friend of the author Joris-Karl Huysmans, the painter Georges Rouault, the philosophers Jacques and Raïssa Maritain and was instrumental in reconciling these intellectuals with Catholicism. However, he acquired a reputation for bigotry because of his frequent outbursts of temper. For example, in 1885, after the death of Victor Hugo, whom Bloy believed to be an atheist, Bloy decried Hugo's "senility," "avarice," and "hypocrisy," identifying Hugo among "contemplatives of biological scum." Bloy's first novel, Le Désespéré, a critique of rationalism 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 Émile Zola, Guy de Maupassant, Ernest Renan, and Anatole France as his enemies. Bloy was noted for personal attacks, but he saw them as the mercy or indignation of God. According to Jacques Maritain, he used to say: "My anger is the effervescence of my pity." Among the many targets of Bloy's attacks were people of business. In an essay in Pilgrim of the Absolute, he compared the businessmen of Chicago unfavourably to the cultured people of Paris: "In Paris you have the Saint Chapelle and the Louvre, true enough, but we in Chicago kill eighty thousand hogs a day!..." The man who says that is in truth a business man. In addition to his published works, he left a large body of correspondence with public and literary figures. He died on 3 November 1917 in Bourg-la-Reine.

Inspired by both the millennialist visionary Eugène Vintras and the reports of an apparition at La Salette—Our Lady of La Salette—Bloy was convinced that the Virgin's message was that if people did not reform, the end time was imminent. He was particularly critical of the attention paid to the shrine at Lourdes and resented the fact that it distracted people from what he saw as the less sentimental message of La Salette.

• Le Désespéré (1887) (The Desperate Man translated into English by Richard Robinson. Sunny Lou Publishing, 2023) • La Femme pauvre (1897) (The Woman Who Was Poor translated into English by I. J. Collins. St. Augustines Press, 2015)

• "Le Révélateur du Globe: Christophe Colomb & Sa Béatification Future" (1884) (In English translation: "The Revealer of the Globe: Christopher Columbus and His Future Beatification" (Part One). Sunny Lou Publishing, 2021) • "Propos d'un entrepreneur de démolitions" (1884) ("Words of a Demolitions Contractor" translated into English by Richard Robinson. Sunny Lou Publishing Company, 2020) • "Un Brelan d'excommuniés" (1889) • "Le Salut par les Juifs" (1892) ("Salvation through the Jews" translated into English by Richard Robinson. Sunny Lou Publishing Company, 2020) • "Léon Bloy devant les cochons" (1894) • "Ici on assassine les grands hommes" (1895) ("Great Men Are Slain Here," in English translation by Sunny Lou Publishing, 2025) • "Je m'accuse" (1900) ("I accuse myself"), in response to Émile Zola's 1898 open letter J'Accuse…! (Je M'Accuse... translated into English by Richard Robinson. Sunny Lou Publishing Company, 2020) • "Le Fils de Louis XVI" (1900) ("The Son of Louis XVI", in English translation. Sunny Lou Publishing, 2022) • "Exégèse des lieux communs" (1902–12) ("Exegesis of the Commonplaces", translated into English by Louis Cancelmi. Wiseblood Books, 2021) • "Belluaires et porchers" (1905) ("Gladiators and swineherds") • "Le Résurrection de Villiers de lʼIsle-Adam" (1906) ("The Resurrection of Villiers de l'Isle-Adam", in English translation. Sunny Lou Publishing, 2022) • "L'épopée byzantine et Gustave Schlumberger" (1906) • "Celle qui pleure" (1908) ("She Who Weeps", in English translation and published by Sunny Lou Publishing, 2021) • "Le Sang du Pauvre" (1909) ("Blood of the Poor", translated into English, and published by Sunny Lou Publishing, 2021) • "L'Ame de Napoléon" (1912) ("The Soul of Napoleon." • Éditions Jérôme Millon, 2021. 192p.. • In English translation: Sunny Lou Publishing Company, 2021) • "Sur la Tombe de Huysmans" (1913) (In English translation: On Huysmans' Tomb: Critical reviews of J.-K. Huysmans and À Rebours, En Rade, and Là-Bas. Sunny Lou Publishing Company, 2021) • "Jeanne d'Arc et l'Allemagne" (1915) ("Joan of Arc and Germany." • Éditions Jérôme Millon, 2016. 176p.. • In English translation: Sunny Lou Publishing Company, 2021) • "Constantinople et Byzance" (1917) ("Constantinople and Byzantium." • Éditions Jérôme Millon, 2025. 176p.. • In English translation: Sunny Lou Publishing Company, 2022)

• Sueur de sang (1893) ("Sweating blood" In English translation: Wakefield Press, 2016) • Histoires désobligeantes (1894) (Disagreeable tales)

• Le Mendiant ingrat (1898) ("The Ungrateful Beggar," Sunny Lou Publishing, 2025.) • Mon Journal (1904) ("My Journal: 1896-1900," Sunny Lou Publishing, 2026.) • Quatre ans de captivité à Cochons-sur-Marne (1905) ("Four Years of Captivity in Cochons-sur-Marne: 1900-1904," Sunny Lou Publishing, 2022.) • 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", edited by David Bentley Hart. Cluny Media, LLC, 2017) • Au seuil de l'Apocalypse (1916) ("On the Threshold of the Apocalypse." In English translation: Sunny Lou Publishing Company, 2021.) • Méditations d'un solitaire en 1916 (1917) ("Meditations of a Solitary in 1916," Sunny Lou Publishing Company, 2023.) • La Porte des humbles (posth., 1920) ("The Door of the Lowly") A study in English is Léon Bloy by Rayner Heppenstall (Cambridge: Bowes & Bowes, 1953).

• "Love does not make you weak, because it is the source of all strength, but it makes you see the nothingness of the illusory strength on which you depended before you knew it." • "There is only one tragedy in the end, not to have been a saint." • "But I love Paris, which is the place of intelligence, and I feel Paris threatened by this truly tragic lampstand sprouting from its belly, which will be visible at night from twenty leagues away..." • “The rich man is an inexorable brute whom one is forced to stop with a pitchfork or a round of grapeshot in the belly...” • “And they [rich Catholics] dare to speak of charity, to pronounce the word Caritas which is the very Name of the divine Third Person! Prostitution of words enough to put fear in the devil! That beautiful lady, who does not have the honesty even to surrender her body to the poor souls whom she arouses, will go, this very evening, to show all that she can of her white, sepulchral flesh where jewels like worms quiver, and make herself worshipped by imbeciles, on supposed feast days of charity, on the occasion of some disaster, to fatten the sharks or shipwreckers a little more. The so-called Christian riches ejaculating on misery!” • "All that happens in life is adorable."