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Hilaire Belloc
Joseph Hilaire Pierre René Belloc was a British-French writer and historian and one of the most prolific writers in England during the early twentieth century. Belloc was also an orator, poet, sailor, satirist, writer of letters, soldier, and political activist. His Catholic faith had a strong impact on his works. He was President of the Oxford Union and later MP for Salford South from 1906 to 1910. He was a noted disputant, with a number of long-running feuds. Belloc became a naturalised British subject in 1902 while retaining his French citizenship.
His writings encompassed religious poetry and comic verse for children. His widely sold Cautionary Tales for Children included "Jim, who ran away from his nurse, and was eaten by a lion" and "Matilda, who told lies and was burned to death".He wrote historical biographies and numerous travel works, including "The Path to Rome" (1902). He also collaborated with G. K. Chesterton on a number of works.
Belloc was born in La Celle-Saint-Cloud, France to a French father, Louis Belloc (1830-1872) and an English mother. His sister Marie Adelaide Belloc Lowndes also grew up to be a writer. Hilaire Belloc grew up in England, and would spend most of his life there. His boyhood was spent in Slindon, West Sussex, for which he often felt homesick in later life.
An 1895 graduate of Balliol College, Oxford, Belloc was a noted figure within the University, being President of the Oxford Union, the undergraduate debating society. He went into politics after he became a naturalised British subject. A great disappointment in his life was his failure to gain a fellowship of All Souls College, Oxford in 1895.
His only period of steady employment after that 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 writing and was often impecunious.
During his later years, he would sail when he could afford to do so and became a well-known yachtsman. He won many races and was on the French sailing team. In the early 1930s, he was given an old Jersey pilot cutter, called Jersey. He sailed this for some years around the coasts of England, with the help of younger men. One of them, Dermod MacCarthy, wrote a book about his time on the water with Belloc, called Sailing with Mr Belloc.
Books by Hilaire Belloc
First and Last
“When a man weighs anchor in a little ship or a large one he does a jolly thing! He cuts himself off and he starts for freedom and for the chance of things. He pulls the jib a-weather, he leans to her slowly pulling round, he sees the wind getting in...
The Servile State
The Servile State is a 1912 book authored by Hilaire Belloc. The book is primarily a history of capitalism in Europe, and a repudiation of the convergence of big business with the state. Belloc lays out two alternatives: distributism and collectivism...
The Free Press
I propose to discuss in what follows the evil of the great modern Capitalist Press, its function in vitiating and misinforming opinion and in putting power into ignoble hands; its correction by the formation of small independent organs, and the proba...
Europe and the Faith
"The Faith is Europe. And Europe is the Faith." Belloc looks first at the Roman Empire, then the place of the early Church inside that Empire, then the Empire's decline, which is represented by the devolution of central power from the Emperor to loca...
On Nothing & Kindred Subjects
“I knew a man once, Maurice, who was at Oxford for three years, and after that went down with no degree. At College, while his friends were seeking for Truth in funny brown German Philosophies, Sham Religions, stinking bottles and identical equations...
On Anything
Long before I knew that the speech of men was misused by them and that they lied in the hearing of the gods perpetually, in those early days through which all men have passed, during which one believes what one is told, an old and crusty woman of gre...
On Something
“Now that story is a symbol, and tells the truth. We see some one thing in this world, and suddenly it becomes particular and sacramental; a woman and a child, a man at evening, a troop of soldiers; we hear notes of music, we smell the smell that wen...
This, That, and the Other
“When Fame comes upon a man well before death then must he most particularly beware of it, for is it then most dangerous. Neither must he, having achieved it, relax effort nor (a much greater peril) think he has done his work because some Fame now at...