Joseph Hilaire Pierre René Belloc (27 July 1870 – 16 July 1953) was a French-English writer and political activist. Belloc was considered one of the most versatile authors of the 20th century, producing essays on history, politics and economics as well as poetry, travelogues and satire. His Catholicism had a strong effect on his works.
Born in the French Empire in 1870, Belloc became a naturalised British subject in 1902 while retaining his French citizenship. While attending Oxford University, he served as President of the Oxford Union. From 1906 to 1910, he served as one of the few Catholic members of the British Parliament.
Belloc was a noted disputant, with a number of feuds. He was also a close friend and collaborator of G. K. Chesterton; George Bernard Shaw, a friend and frequent debate opponent of both Belloc and Chesterton, dubbed the pair "the Chesterbelloc". Belloc's 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).
Joseph Hilaire Pierre René Belloc was born on 27 July 1870 in La Celle-Saint-Cloud, France to a French father, Louis Belloc, and an English mother. His sister Marie Adelaide Belloc Lowndes also became a writer.
Belloc's mother Bessie Rayner Parkes was a writer, activist and an advocate for women's equality, a co-founder of the English Woman's Journal and the Langham Place Group. As an adult, Belloc campaigned against women's suffrage as a member of the Women's National Anti-Suffrage League.
Belloc's maternal grandfather was Joseph Parkes. Belloc's grandmother, Elizabeth Rayner Priestley, was born in the United States, a granddaughter of Joseph Priestley. In 1867, Bessie Rayner Parkes married Louis Belloc, an attorney, son of Jean-Hilaire Belloc and Louise Swanton Belloc. In 1872, five years after their marriage, Louis died but not before being ruined in a stock market crash. The young widow then brought her children from France back to England.
Belloc grew up in England; his boyhood was spent in Slindon, West Sussex. He wrote about his home in poems such as "West Sussex Drinking Song", "The South Country", and "Ha'nacker Mill"; after graduating from John Henry Newman's Oratory School in Edgbaston, Birmingham.
In September 1889, Belloc's sister Marie made the accidental acquaintance of a Catholic widow, Mrs. Ellen Hogan, who was travelling from California on a European tour with two of her children, her daughters Elizabeth and Elodie. The travellers were both devoutly Catholic and keenly interested in literature, and Marie arranged a visit with her mother, Bessie, who in turn arranged an audience with Henry Cardinal Manning. These acts of generosity cemented a strong friendship, further deepened when Marie and Bessie accompanied the Hogans on their tour of France, visiting Paris with them. Hilaire was absent touring the French provinces as a correspondent for The Pall Mall Gazette, but when the Hogans stopped back in London on their return from another European trip the following year, Belloc met Elodie for the first time, and was smitten.
Shortly after this meeting, Ellen Hogan was called back to California prematurely to take care of another of her children who was stricken with illness. She left her two daughters, who wished to remain in London, under the care of the Belloc family, and, Bessie asked her son to squire the Hogan daughters around London. Belloc's interest in Elodie grew more fervid by the day. This was the beginning of a long, intercontinental, and star-crossed courtship, made all the more difficult by the opposition of Elodie's mother, who wished Elodie to enter the convent, and Hilaire's mother, who thought her son was too young to marry. Belloc pursued Elodie with letters, and, after her return to the United States, in 1891, he pursued her in person.
The impoverished Belloc, still only twenty years old, sold nearly everything he had to purchase a steamship ticket to New York, ostensibly to visit relatives in Philadelphia. Belloc's true reason for the trek to America became apparent when, after spending a few days in Philadelphia, he began to make his way across the American continent. Part of his journey was by train, but when the money ran out, Belloc just walked. An athletic man who hiked extensively in Britain and Europe, Belloc made his way on foot for a significant part of the 2,870 miles (4,620 km) from Philadelphia to San Francisco. While walking, he paid for lodging at remote farm houses and ranches by sketching the owners and reciting poetry.
Belloc's first letter on his arrival in San Francisco is effervescent, happy to see Elodie and full of hopes for their future, but his manifestly zealous courtship was to go unrewarded. The joy he felt at seeing Elodie soon gave way to disappointment when the apparently insurmountable opposition of her mother to the marriage manifested itself. After a stay of only a few weeks, far shorter than the time he had spent in his journey to California, the crestfallen Belloc made his way back across the United States, after a fruitless journey. His biographer Joseph Pearce compares the return to Napoleon's long winter retreat from Moscow. When Belloc finally reached the East Coast at Montclair, New Jersey, he received a letter from Elodie on 30 April 1891, definitively rejecting him in favour of a religious vocation; the steamship trip home was tainted with despair.
The gloomy Belloc threw himself into restless activity. Determined to fulfil the obligation of military service necessary to retain his French citizenship, Belloc served his term with an artillery regiment near Toul in 1891. While he was serving in France, Elodie's mother Ellen died, removing a significant obstacle to Belloc's hopes, but Elodie, although torn between her affection for Hilaire and her desire to serve God in the religious life, was unwilling to cross her mother's wishes so soon after her mother's untimely death and persisted in refusing Belloc's advances.
After his year of service was concluded, still pining for and writing to Elodie, he took the entrance exam to Oxford University, where he entered Balliol College in January 1893.
In the autumn of 1895, Elodie entered the religious life and joined the Sisters of Charity at Emmitsburg, Maryland, as a postulant. She left a month later, writing to Belloc that she had failed in her religious vocation. In March 1896, having secured financing as an Oxford Extension lecturer in Philadelphia, Germantown, Baltimore and New Orleans, Belloc took a steamship to New York, and started making his way to Elodie in California. He expected to receive letters from her on his journey, but received none. To his shock and dismay, when he finally arrived in California in May, he discovered Elodie was deathly ill, worn out by the stress of the previous year. Belloc, thinking that after all their suffering, he and his beloved would be denied one another by her death, also collapsed. Over the next few weeks, Elodie recovered and after a tumultuous six-year courtship, Belloc and Elodie were married at St. John the Baptist Catholic church in Napa, California, on 15 June 1896. They settled initially in Oxford.
Belloc first came to public attention shortly after arriving at Balliol College, Oxford, in January 1893, a recent French army veteran. Attending his first debate at the Oxford Union debating society, he saw that the affirmative position was wretchedly and half-heartedly defended. As the debate drew to its conclusion, and the division of the house was about to be called, he rose from his seat in the audience and delivered a vigorous, impromptu defence of the proposition. Belloc was deemed to have won that debate, as the division of the house then showed, and his reputation as a debater was established. He was later elected president of the Union for one academic term. He held his own in debates there with F. E. Smith and John Buchan, the latter a friend. John Simon, who was a contemporary at Oxford, later described his "...resonant, deep pitched voice..." as making an "...unforgettable impression". Gilbert Murray recalled an occasion in 1899 when he "attended a meeting on the principles of Liberalism, at which Hilaire Belloc spoke brilliantly although Murray could not afterwards remember a word that he had said."