BLOY, LÉON. - Writer, b. at Périgueux on 11 July 1846 and d. at Bourg-la-Reine on 3 Nov. 1917. A passionately Catholic spirit, unacquainted with gentle tolerance ("tout ce qui n'est pas exclusivement, éperdument catholique n'a d'autre droit que celui de se taire"); in constant war with his materialist century, an enemy of the lay spirit which in his eyes was guilty of the major compromises; a despiser of the conciliatory, flat, all-too-practical bourgeois class; ready to hurl anathema upon every social mediocrity and lie, whether it were a matter of tepid Christians or of writers ready to compromise, this entrepreneur de démolitions, opposed above all within the Catholic milieu itself, devoted his entire work, which comprises some thirty volumes, to the ever higher glorification of God.
Of these, particularly significant are the 8 that make up the Journal, namely: Le mendiant ingrat, Mon journal, Quatre ans de captivité à Cochons-sur-Marne, L'invendable, Le vieux de la Montagne, Le Pèlerin de l'Absolu, Au seuil de l'Apocalypse, La porte des humbles (and which, even with the differences that obtain in the attitudes of the two writers, makes us think of Jules Renard's Journal).
Of an integral, apocalyptic Catholicism, which inspired in him the quivering expectation of the reign of the Spirit, missionné pour le témoignage in his crusade against the enemies of truth and justice, he incessantly affirms Christian solidarity; he spreads words of consolation in his letters; but, a nature of elemental violence and impulsiveness, incapable of balance or serenity, he always reveals himself as a passionate polemicist par indignation et par amour. Always sincere but uneven and sometimes moved by personal animosity, he is often unjust and thus falls into contradictions: he proceeds by intuition, expresses himself through visions and prophecies, creates a hallucinatory atmosphere, furnishes reality with a mystical character. He denounces the mediocrity of the clergy, which he considers the unconscious depositary of the divine mysteries and revelations; he is antimodern in that he is hostile to the materialistic exaggerations of the modern world: hatred asserts itself in him as a function of love, and in exaggeration and rebellion, even if at times he seems to overshoot the mark, he reveals yearnings of tenderness, shows himself an most ardent adorer of God. In his last years, finally, his work would come to know the serenity and the moving humility attested by the Méditations d'un solitaire (1916) and Dans les ténèbres (1917).
A poet in prose, capable of refined analyses, he had the gift of narrating and depicting with the most perfect vividness; his style knows how to expand into ample invective, to become caustic and quivering, to catch fire in the lightning-flash of anathema, which recalls Tertullian, to lose itself in the most restrained tenderness. The novel La femme pauvre ends with the celebrated words: "Il n'y a qu'une misère: c'est de n'être pas des saints".
Mention should be made of: Le Révélateur du globe (Paris 1884) on C. Columbus, Le désespéré (ibid. 1886); La Chevalière de la Mort (ibid. 1896) dedicated to Marie Antoinette, La femme pauvre (ibid. 1896); Belluaires et porchers (ibid. 1905); Celle qui pleure (ibid. 1908), dedicated to the Madonna de la Salette, to whom the Vie de Mélanie (ibid. 1912) also refers; Le sang du pauvre (ibid. 1909); L'âme de Napoléon (ibid. 1912); posthumously the Lettres de jeunesse and those to his fiancée have been printed.
Bibliography14 works
Jole Scudieri Ruggieri