BLOY, LÉON. — Writer, born at Périgueux on 11 July 1846 and died at Bourg-la-Reine on 3 November 1917. A passionately Catholic spirit, unaware of gentle tolerance (“everything that is not exclusively, desperately Catholic has no right other than to keep silent”); at constant war with his materialistic century, an enemy of the secular spirit, which in his eyes was guilty of the major compromises; contemptuous of the conciliatory, shallow, excessively practical bourgeois class; ready to pronounce an anathema upon every social mediocrity and falsehood, whether it concerned lukewarm Christians or writers ready to compromise, this entrepreneur de démolitions, opposed above all within Catholic circles themselves, devoted his entire work, comprising about thirty volumes, to the ever greater glorification of God.
Of these, the eight that make up the Journal are particularly significant, 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 (which, despite the differences between the attitudes of the two writers, brings to mind the Journal of Jules Renard).
Of an integral, apocalyptic Catholicism, which inspired in him a fervent expectation of the reign of the Spirit, missionné pour le témoignage in his crusade against the enemies of truth and justice, he constantly affirmed Christian solidarity; in his letters he spread words of consolation; but, a man of elemental violence and impulsiveness, incapable of balance or serenity, he always revealed himself as a passionate polemicist, through indignation and through love. Always sincere but uneven, and at times moved by personal animosity, he is often unjust and consequently falls into contradictions: he proceeds by intuition, expresses himself through visions and prophecies, creates a hallucinatory atmosphere, and imbues reality with a mystical character. He denounces the mediocrity of the clergy, whom he regards as unconscious custodians of divine mysteries and revelations; he is antimodern insofar as 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 may seem to overstep the mark, he reveals anxieties of tenderness and proves himself an ardent worshipper of God. In his final years, at last, his work would attain the serenity and moving humility attested by Les Méditations d'un solitaire (1916) and Dans les ténèbres (1917).
A poet in prose, capable of refined analysis, he possessed the gift of narrating and depicting with the most perfect vividness; his style could expand into broad invective, become caustic and fervent, blaze up in a thunderous anathema reminiscent of Tertullian, and lose itself in the most exquisite tenderness. The novel La femme pauvre concludes with the celebrated words: “There is only one misery: not to be saints.”
The following should be mentioned: Le Révélateur du globe (Paris 1884), on C. Colombo; Le désespéré (ibid. 1886); La Chevalière de la Mort (ibid. 1896), devoted to Maria Antonietta; La femme pauvre (ibid. 1896); Belluaires et porchers (ibid. 1905); Celle qui pleure (ibid. 1908), devoted to Our Lady of La Salette, to whom the Vie de Mélanie (ibid. 1912) also refers; Le sang du pauvre (ibid. 1909); L'âme de Napoléon (ibid. 1912); the Lettres de jeunesse and those to his fiancée were printed posthumously.