Léon Henri Marie Bloy (pronounced "Blwah") (11 July 1846 — 3 Novel 1917) was a French novelist, essayist, and satirist. He was a staunch Catholic and was very influential within French Catholic circles, while also having a penchant for ruining friendships for his unrelenting attacks.
Bloy was born in Périgueux to Jean-Baptiste Bloy, a civil servant at the Ponts et Chaussées and Freemason, and Anne-Marie Carreau, a devout Catholic and the daughter of a French soldier who met a Spanish woman during the Napoleonic wars; Bloy was the second of six sons.
Bloy had a miserable upbringing, being routinely whipped by his father and constantly fantasising about freedom; his mother's religious piety was his only consolation. He was also a middling student at the lycée de Périgueux, to the point where he was kicked out for "academic intransigence" in 1862. His exasperated father eventually took education into his own hands and tried to direct him towards architecture; during this time, Bloy developed an intense hatred for the Catholic Church and its doctrines. Jean-Baptiste found him a job in Paris in 1864, and Bloy worked as a clerk in the office of the principal architect of Orléans Railway Company, though he daydreamed of escaping. He also frequented socialist and anticlerical circles.
On December 1868, Bloy met Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly, the staunch Catholic novelist and dandy, who lived opposite him in rue Rousselet and became his mentor. Barbey d'Aurevily introduced him to the philosopher Antoine Blanc de Saint-Bonnet and the writer Ernest Hello. These Catholic authors profoundly impacted Bloy, who eventually underwent a drastic religious conversion.
Bloy enlisted in the Mobiles de la Dordogne regiment in the Armée de la Loire in 1870, at the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War, during which he served as a sniper (he went on to draw from his experiences in the war to write the short story collection Sweating Blood in 1893). He was commended for his bravery and returned to Périgueux the following year, forsaking his career as an office clerk for the life of a bohemian. When he returned to Paris in 1873, Bloy, at the recommendation of Barbey d'Aurevilly, took up a job as an editor of L'Univers, the major Catholic newspaper run by Louis Veuillot. However, he quickly ruined his career with his severe, uncompromising criticisms. He went on to have a love affair with Anne-Marie Roule, an occasional prostitute who became his mistress; Bloy and Roule shared a number of profound mystical experiences, and Roule converted in 1878.
When his parents died in 1877, Bloy went to a Trappist monastery and met Abbé Tardif de Moidrey, who introduced him to symbolic exegesis during a stay at La Salette. Bloy went on to take the idea of a "universal symbolism", which he went on to apply to history, contemporary events, and his own life. He went on to return to writing, vociferously attacking the likes of Léon Gambetta, Émile Zola, and Victor Hugo, whom Bloy attacked for being an atheist. At the start of 1882, Anne-Marie began showing signs of madness; she was eventually interred into the Sainte-Anne Hospital in Paris, which she never left. Bloy, inconsolable over the fate of his mistress, went on a retreat to the Grande Chartreuse on November, seeking aid from the Carthusians in helping him write a book about Christopher Columbus. This book, the first he has ever published, came to be known as The Revealer of the Globe: Christopher Columbus and His Future Beatification (1884). It was during this time that he became friends with Joris Karl Huysmans and Auguste de Villiers de l'Isle-Adam.
Bloy moved to Vaugirard for six years in 1886. During this time, he began writing his first novel: a semi-autobiographical novel called The Desperate Man (1887), mirroring his relationship with Anne-Marie. He published this work on January 1887, but to little fanfare. Nevertheless, he went on to write The Desperate Woman, the first draft of what would become The Woman Who Was Poor, but he wrote a series of articles for the Gil Blas mazagine to earn a living.
On 1889, Barbey d'Aurevilly died on 23 April, with Villiers dying on 19 August, profoundly saddening Bloy. The circumstances of Barbey d'Aurevilly's death earned Bloy violent attacks from Joséphin Peladan, a former friend who published these attacks under the name "Sâr"; nearly all of the press welcomed the condemnations of Bloy. His friendship with Huysmans ended before the publication of Là-bas, where Bloy was caricatured. On the other hand, Bloy met Johanne Charlotte Molbech, daughter of the Danish poet Christian Frederik Molbech at the end of the year. Johanne converted to the Catholic faith and married Bloy, finding in him a strange charisma despite his perpetual destitution.
Bloy proceeded to enter a phase of prolific creativity, writing Sweating Blood (1893) and Disagreeable Tales (1894). At the same time, however, he was sacked from Gil Blas following yet another controversy, further worsening his destitution. The couple's sons, André and Pierre, die of malnutrition, and Johanne fell ill. Bloy proceeded to write The Woman Who Was Poor (1897), once again to little fanfare.
In 1898, Bloy published The Thankless Beggar, yet again to little fanfare. However, the work was enthusiastically received by Jacques Maritain and his wife Raïssa, who converted to the Catholic faith under his influence and became his steadfast friends and torchbearers. Bloy continued to write, but over time, the world finally came to recognise his genius. On the other hand, upon the outbreak of World War I on 28 July 1914, Bloy wrote his most pessimistic works, including Joan of Arc and Germany (1915), On the Threshold of the Apocalypse (1916), and Meditations of a Solitary in 1916 (1916), feeling that his attacks on man were vindicated.
On 3 November 1917, Bloy died peacefully, shortly after receiving last communion on All Saints' Day, surrounded by family and friends, in the house that once belonged to Charles Peguy. He was buried in the Bourg-la-Reine Cemetery.
Bloy was nicknamed "the thankless beggar" for relying entirely on the charity of his friends to support him and his family. He was also called "the pilgrim of the absolute" because of his attacks that are as unrelenting as his fidelity to the Catholic Church. Émile Zola was one of his literary enemies, and he wrote Je M'Accuse... (1900), a very scathing attack on Zola's novels Lourdes and Fecundity. He even despised the wealthy, gleefully exulting the sinking of the RMS Titanic in 1912 and two different fires: one at the Opéra-Comique in 1887 and another in 1896 at the Bazar de la Charité, an annual Catholic charity event. In The Woman Who Was Poor, Bloy once jubilated at the thought of a wealthy woman burning to death.
