Belloc hilaire biography

There is no reason why its recent inferiority in mechanical construction, whether military or civilian, should continue indefinitely. Even a slight accession of material power would make the further control of Islam by an alien culture difficult. A little more and there will cease that which our time has taken for granted, the physical domination of Islam by the disintegrated Christendom we know.

Belloc considered that Islam was permanently intent on destroying the Christian faith, as well as the West, which Christendom had built. Belloc's writings were at times supportive of anti-Semitism and other times condemnatory of it. Belloc took a leading role in denouncing the Marconi scandal of Belloc emphasized that key players in both the government and the Marconi corporation had been Jewish.

American historian Todd Endelman identifies Catholic writers as central critics. In his opinion:. The most virulent attacks in the Marconi affair were launched by Hilaire Belloc and the brothers Cecil and G. Chesterton, whose hostility to Jews was linked to their opposition to liberalism , their backward-looking Catholicism, and the nostalgia for a medieval Catholic Europe that they imagined was ordered, harmonious, and homogeneous.

The Jew baiting at the time of the Boer War and the Marconi scandal was linked to a broader protest, mounted in the main by the Radical wing of the Liberal Party, against the growing visibility of successful businessmen in national life and their challenges to what were seen as traditional English values. Wilson's biography expresses the belief that Belloc tended to allude to Jews negatively in conversation, sometimes obsessively.

Anthony Powell mentions in his review of that biography that in his view Belloc was thoroughly anti-Semitic, at all but a personal level. In his book, The Jews , Belloc argued that "the continued presence of the Jewish nation intermixed with other nations alien to it presents a permanent problem of the gravest character", and that the "Catholic Church is the conservator of an age-long European tradition, and that tradition will never compromise with the fiction that a Jew can be other than a Jew.

Wherever the Catholic Church has power, and in proportion to its power, the Jewish problem will be recognized to the full. Robert Speaight cited a letter by Belloc in which he condemned Nesta Webster because of her accusations against "the Jews". Webster had rejected Christianity, studied Eastern religions , accepted the supposed Hindu concept of the equality of all religions and was fascinated by theories of reincarnation and ancestral memory.

Belloc grew up in Slindon and spent most of his life in the part of Sussex that is now West Sussex. He always wrote of Sussex as if it were the crown of England and the western Sussex Downs the jewel in that crown. One of his best-known works relating to Sussex is The Four Men: A Farrago , in which the four characters, each aspects of Belloc's personality, [ 59 ] [ 60 ] travel on a pilgrimage across the county from Robertsbridge to Harting.

Belloc was also a lover of Sussex songs [ 61 ] and wrote lyrics for some songs which have since been put to music. At last he swallowed some which tied Itself in ugly Knots inside.

Belloc hilaire biography

Henry will very soon be dead. In my opinion it is a lunatic book. She is one of those people who have got one cause on the brain. It is the good old 'Jewish revolutionary' bogey. But there is a type of unstable mind which cannot rest without morbid imaginings, and the conception of a single cause simplifies thought. With this good woman it is the Jews, with some people it is the Jesuits , with others Freemasons and so on.

The world is more complex than that. The Third Reich has treated its Jewish subjects with a contempt for Justice which even if there had been no other action of the kind in other departments would be a sufficient warranty for determining its elimination from Europe Cruelty to a Jew is as odious as cruelty to any human being, whether that cruelty be moral in the form of insult, or physical You may hear men saying on every side, 'However, there is one thing I do agree with and that is the way they The Nazis have settled the Jews'.

Now that attitude is directly immoral. The more danger there is that it will grow the more necessity there is for denouncing it. The action of the enemy toward the Jewish race has been in morals intolerable. Contracts have been broken on all sides, careers destroyed by the hundred and the thousand, individuals have been treated with the most hideous and disgusting cruelty If no price is paid for such excesses, our civilisation will certainly suffer and suffer permanently.

If the men who have committed them go unpunished and only defeat in war can punish them then the decline of Europe, already advanced, will proceed to catastrophe. Contents move to sidebar hide. Article Talk. Read Edit View history. Tools Tools. Download as PDF Printable version. In other projects. Wikimedia Commons Wikiquote Wikisource Wikidata item.

French-English writer — Portrait by E. Elodie Hogan. Rerum novarum Populorum progressio Graves de communi re Quadragesimo anno Laborem exercens Sollicitudo rei socialis Centesimus annus Laudato si'. Related topics. Family and career [ edit ]. Family [ edit ]. Early life [ edit ]. Courtship, marriage, and premature death of his wife [ edit ].

Political career [ edit ]. In controversy and debate [ edit ]. Later years [ edit ]. Death and legacy [ edit ]. Hobbies [ edit ]. Writing [ edit ]. See also: Hilaire Belloc bibliography. Essays and travel writing [ edit ]. Poetry [ edit ]. History, politics, and economics [ edit ]. Reprints [ edit ]. Religion [ edit ]. On Islam [ edit ]. Accusations of antisemitism [ edit ].

Further information: G. Sussex [ edit ]. In the media [ edit ]. See also [ edit ]. Notes [ edit ]. The London Gazette. II, No. Chesterton and Mr. Hilaire Belloc. Fisher Unwin Ltd. Oxford illustrated encyclopedia. Judge, Harry George. Oxford [England]: Oxford University Press. ISBN OCLC Balliol College, Oxford, UK. Retrieved 18 September The Life of Hilaire Belloc.

Of course Belloc was prejudiced, but there were few who knew him who did not love his prejudices, who did not love to hear him fight for them, and who did not honour him for the sincerity and passion with which he held to them. Once the battle was joined all his armoury was marshalled and flung into the fray. Dialectic, Scorn, Quip, Epigram, Sarcasm, Historical Evidence, Massive Argument, and Moral Teaching—of all these weapons he was a past master and each was mobilised and made to play its proper part in the attack.

Yet he was a courteous and a chivalrous man. A deeply sensitive man, his was the kindest and most understanding nature I have ever known. In spite of a rollicking and bombastic side he was as incapable of the least cruelty as he was capable of the most delicate sympathy with other people's feelings. As he himself used to say of others in a curiously quiet and simple way, 'He is a good man.

He will go to Heaven'. Archived from the original on 25 March Retrieved 25 March Retrieved 27 April Commonwealth War Graves Commission. Oxford University Press. Article by Bernard Berganzi. Archived from the original on 21 May Retrieved 26 February The Great War and Modern Memory. New York: Oxford University Press. References [ edit ].

Belloc, Hilaire. Boyle, David. Braybrooke, Patrick. Some Thoughts on Hilaire Belloc, Drane's, Cooney, Anthony. Corrin, Jay P. Coyne, Edward J. Feske, Victor. Distributism , also known as distributionism and distributivism , is a third-way economic philosophy formulated by such Roman Catholic thinkers as Chesterton and Belloc to apply the principles of social justice articulated by the Roman Catholic Church , especially in Pope Leo XIII 's encyclical Rerum Novarum [9] and more expansively explained by Pope Pius XI's encyclical Quadragesimo Anno On the Reconstruction of the Social Order [10] According to distributism, the ownership of the means of production should be spread as widely as possible among the general populace, rather than being centralized under the control of a few state bureaucrats some forms of socialism or wealthy private individuals capitalism.

A summary of distributism is found in Chesterton's statement: "Too much capitalism does not mean too many capitalists, but too few capitalists. Essentially, distributism distinguishes itself by its distribution of property. Distributism holds that, while socialism allows no individuals to own productive property it all being under state, community, or workers' control , and capitalism allows only a few to own it, distributism itself seeks to ensure that most people will become owners of productive property.

As Belloc stated, the distributive state that is, the state which has implemented distributism contains "an agglomeration of families of varying wealth, but by far the greater number of owners of the means of production. Under such a system, most people would be able to earn a living without having to rely on the use of the property of others to do so.

Examples of people earning a living in this way would be farmers who own their own land and related machinery, plumbers who own their own tools, software developers who own their own computer, etc. The " co-operative " approach advances beyond this perspective to recognize that such property and equipment may be "co-owned" by local communities larger than a family, e.

Distributism sees the trinitarian human family of one male, one female, and their children as the central and primary social unit of human ordering and the principal unit of a functioning distributist society and civilization. This unit is also the basis of a multi-generational extended family, which is embedded in socially as well as genetically inter-related communities, nations, etc.

The economic system of a society should therefore be focused primarily on the flourishing of the family unit, but not in isolation: at the appropriate level of family context, as is intended in the principle of subsidiarity. Distributism reflects this doctrine most evidently by promoting the family, rather than the individual, as the basic type of owner; that is, distributism seeks to ensure that most families, rather than most individuals, will be owners of productive property.

The family is, then, vitally important to the very core of distributist thought. With these linked themes in the background, he wrote a long series of contentious biographies of historical figures, including Oliver Cromwell , James II , and Napoleon Bonaparte. They show him as an ardent proponent of orthodox Catholicism and a critic of many elements of the modern world.

Outside academe, Belloc was impatient with what he considered to be axe-grinding histories, especially what he called "official history. Wells's popular Outline of History :. Belloc objected to his adversary's tacitly anti-Christian stance, epitomized by the fact that Wells had devoted more space in his "history" to the Persian campaign against the Greeks than he had given to the figure of Christ.

He wrote also substantial amounts of military history. 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. Those views were expressed at length in many of his works from the period These are still cited as exemplary of Catholic apologetics.

They have also been criticized, for instance by comparison with the work of Christopher Dawson during the same period. As a young man, Belloc lost his faith. Then came a spiritual event which he never discussed publicly, and which returned him to and confirmed him in his Catholicism for the remainder of his life. Belloc alludes to this return to the faith in a passage in The Cruise of the Nona.

Belloc's book The Crusades: the World's Debate made no pretense at impartiality. Despite addressing events that were more than eight centuries old, it took a highly partisan stance. Since the Crusaders missed that chance, Islam survived and eventually overwhelmed the Crusader bridgehead in the Middle East. For Belloc this was not a matter of old history: Islam continued to pose a dangerous present and future threat.

At the time of his writing, the Islamic world was still largely under the rule of the European colonial powers and the threat to Britain was from Fascism and Nazism. Belloc, however, considered that Islam was permanently intent on destroying the Church, as well as the West, which Christendom had built. He compared many of the beliefs and theological principles which Islam shares with Catholicism [16] —yet despite these similarities, or rather because of them, Belloc's views it as a heresy.

It is in its view of Jesus that Islam decisively diverges from Catholicism and Christianity in general , in the "denial of the Incarnation and all the sacramental life of the Church that followed from it. For example, Norman Rose's book The Cliveden Set poses the question of whether Nancy Astor [19] , a friend of Belloc's in the s until they broke over religious matters, was influenced by him against Jews in general.

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. 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.

Robert Speaight cited a letter by Belloc in which he pilloried Nesta Webster because of her accusations against "the Jews. Webster had rejected Christianity , studied Eastern religions, accepted the Hindu concept of the equality of all religions and was fascinated by theories of reincarnation and ancestral memory. She is one of those people who have got one cause on the brain.

It is the good old 'Jewish revolutionary' bogey. But there is a type of unstable mind which cannot rest without morbid imaginings, and the conception of a single cause simplifies thought. With this good woman it is the Jews , with some people it is the Jesuits , with others Freemasons and so on. The world is more complex than that. Speaight also points out that when faced with anti-Semitism in practice—as at elitist country clubs in America before World War II —he voiced his disapproval.

He notes that Belloc condemned wild accusations against the Jews, in his own book, The Jews. Belloc's legacy is mixed. His social and economic views were predecessors to the "third way" ideas that would emerge briefly after the collapse of the Soviet Union, although they quickly fell out of favor as there proved to be no workable solutions that were not essentially capitalist.

His religious views are now out of favor as are his anti-Semitic views. New World Encyclopedia writers and editors rewrote and completed the Wikipedia article in accordance with New World Encyclopedia standards. This article abides by terms of the Creative Commons CC-by-sa 3. Credit is due under the terms of this license that can reference both the New World Encyclopedia contributors and the selfless volunteer contributors of the Wikimedia Foundation.

To cite this article click here for a list of acceptable citing formats. The history of earlier contributions by wikipedians is accessible to researchers here:. Jump to: navigation , search. Previous Hijacking. Next Hilarius. Of course Belloc was prejudiced, but there were few who knew him who did not love his prejudices, who did not love to hear him fight for them, and who did not honor him for the sincerity and passion with which he held to them.

Once the battle was joined all his armory was marshaled and flung into the fray. Dialectic, Scorn, Quip, Epigram, Sarcasm, Historical Evidence, Massive Argument, and Moral Teaching—of all these weapons he was a past master and each was mobilized and made to play its proper part in the attack. Yet he was a courteous and a chivalrous man. A deeply sensitive man, his was the kindest and most understanding nature I have ever known.

In spite of a rollicking and bombastic side he was as incapable of the least cruelty as he was capable of the most delicate sympathy with other people's feelings. Poet of Light Verse While Belloc's political and social views have proven unpopular, critics have highly praised the author's light verse, with W. Belloc's view of children did not look backward to the Victorian nonsense poets, but forward to the films of W.

Hilaire Belloc is chiefly remembered for his controversial political opinions, often belligerent character, and strong allegiance to the Catholic Church. His deep feelings about the important political and social issues of his day manifest themselves in most of his works. Although he has been criticized because of his tendency to sermonize, the sheer number of his published works, their versatility, and their stirring and often humorous style are impressive.

Wells — : English writer who is best known today for his pioneering science fiction novels. During his lifetime, he was also an outspoken advocate of socialism. Chesterton — : Influential English writer who was widely praised by his contemporaries. Corrin, Jay P. Athens: Ohio University Press, Feske, Victor. Hamilton, Robert. London: Douglas Organ, Lowndes, Marie Belloc.

New York : Dodd, Mead, Morton, J. Hilaire Belloc: A Memoir. Wilhelmsen, Frederick. Hilaire Belloc: No Alienated Man. Woodruf, Douglas, ed. The mockery of human pretensions through the use of nonsense verses about animals were a central aspect of Belloc's children's stories. Here are some other works of children's stories with similar themes:.

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland , a children's book by Lewis Carroll. This classic children's book follows Alice's adventures in a topsy-turvy world populated by talking animals and outlandish characters. Ogden Nash 's Zoo , a collection of children's poems by Ogden Nash. This book consists of short, nonsensical poems about animals. This is a film adaptation of the Lemony Snicket series of books that follows the adventures of three children through absurdist storylines.

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People Literature and the Arts English Literature, 20th cent. Belloc, Hilaire gale. Gale Contextual Encyclopedia of World Literature. Learn more about citation styles Citation styles Encyclopedia. Belloc, Joseph Hilaire oxford. Belloc became a British citizen in , and was a Liberal MP — A versatile writer, his work includes satirical novels some illustrated by his long-term collaborator, G.

Chesterton , biographies, historical works and travel writing. He is best-known for his light verse, especially the children's classic, Cautionary Tales More From encyclopedia. About this article Hilaire Belloc All Sources -.