Leon Bloy (1846-1917)

The "ungrateful beggar" and the "pilgrim of the absolute"

Leon Bloy never had money. Throughout his life, he lived on loans, appeals, gifts from friends, often on the edge of hunger, moving from hovel to hovel. Far from hiding this, he made it the very subject of his work. His first major journal is bluntly titled Le Mendiant ingrat (The Ungrateful Beggar): in it he recounts his debts, humiliations, the death of his children, and his anger against the rich who let "the Poor Man" die — that is, for him, Christ himself.^[5][6]

The second nickname, "the pilgrim of the absolute", names the other side of the man. Bloy was not seeking comfort or recognition: he was seeking God, holiness, the absolute, with an intransigence that made him unbearable to the world. Le Pelerin de l'Absolu became, in fact, the title of a volume of his journal in 1914.^[7] These two formulas summarize his paradox: a man who begged for bread while refusing to beg for the slightest concession on truth.

A writer quoted twice by a pope

The clearest sign of Leon Bloy's lasting importance did not come from literary criticism, but from Rome. On March 14, 2013, the day after his election, Pope Francis celebrated his first Mass with the cardinals in the Sistine Chapel. In his homily, to express the stakes of confessing Christ, he quoted a layman, a non-canonized novelist:

"When one does not profess Jesus Christ, I am reminded of the saying of Leon Bloy: 'Whoever does not pray to the Lord prays to the devil.'" — Pope Francis, homily at the Pro Ecclesia Mass with the cardinals, Sistine Chapel, March 14, 2013^[8]

Five years later, in his apostolic exhortation on the call to holiness, Gaudete et exsultate (2018), the same pope returned to Bloy to sum up the whole point: in life "there is only one sadness: not to be saints."^[9] That a pope should choose, twice, the words of a writer who looks so unrecommendable at first glance — first to open a pontificate, then to speak of holiness for all — says much: Bloy's voice touches something academic theology rarely says with such force.

From a godless childhood to conversion

Leon Bloy was born on July 11, 1846, at Notre-Dame-de-Sanilhac in Dordogne, into a divided family: a civil-servant father, a freethinker heir to Voltaire, and a deeply believing mother, daughter of one of Napoleon's soldiers.^[10][11] The child grew up without real faith and even developed, in adolescence, a hatred of the Church that he would later renounce with horror. Sent to Paris in 1864 to find work, he lived through a dark and directionless youth.^[12]

Everything changed in December 1868. Bloy met his neighbor, the writer Barbey d'Aurevilly, a flamboyant Catholic and dandy, already elderly. Contact with this old master provoked in him a shattering conversion, intellectual and spiritual at once, which restored him to the religion of his childhood.^[13][14] Soon the influence of Ernest Hello, an unrecognized mystical writer whom Bloy would venerate as a second spiritual father, was added to Barbey's. From this double filiation, Bloy kept one conviction he would never lose: literature has meaning only if it serves the absolute of God.

Anne-Marie Roule: the "Veronica" and the mystical night

In 1877, Bloy met Anne-Marie Roule, a young woman who had fallen into prostitution. He rescued her from the street, converted her, and lived with her through a strange spiritual adventure made of prayer, visions and apocalyptic forebodings.^[15] She inspired fiery meditations on the end times, La Salette and mercy. But exaltation turned into tragedy: Anne-Marie sank into insanity and was confined at Sainte-Anne hospital in 1882, where she would end her days.^[16]

This broken woman marked Bloy's imagination forever: he transposed her into Veronique, the heroine of his novel Le Desespere, the figure of the sinful woman redeemed by pain. All Bloy's spirituality — salvation through suffering, the hidden holiness of the humiliated — bears the imprint of this experience.

Marriage to Jeanne Molbech and the mourning of his children

At the end of 1889, Bloy met Johanne (Jeanne) Molbech, a young Danish woman, daughter of the Danish poet and playwright Christian Knud Frederik Molbech (1821-1888), himself the son of the lexicographer Christian Molbech (1783-1857). She converted to Catholicism and married him the following year, in 1890.^[17][18] The couple, united by a common faith, experienced terrible poverty but real tenderness, as Bloy's abundant correspondence to his wife shows. Four children were born: Veronique, Andre, Pierre and Madeleine.

The years 1895-1896 were the most painful of his life: Bloy lost, one after the other, his two sons who died in infancy, Andre and then Pierre — the latter on September 24, 1896 —, carried off by illness and poverty.^[19] This bereavement did not shake his faith; it drove him deeper into his central intuition: the suffering of the innocent is not absurd, it is mysteriously united to the Cross. The death of his sons became one of the burning sources of his spiritual work.

Poverty as a vocation

One understands nothing about Leon Bloy unless one admits that his poverty was not merely endured: it was accepted as a vocation. Bloy could have softened his pen, as so many writers did, in order to live from journalism or salons. He refused, considering that earning money by flattering the public would be equivalent to betraying God.^[20] He therefore lived from the charity of faithful friends, whom he often scolded for ingratitude — hence the provocative title Le Mendiant ingrat.

This poverty was not a literary pose: it was a lived theology. For Bloy, the poor man is the very place where Christ makes himself present, and money is a mystical and fearful reality, bound to the blood of Christ and the blood of the poor. He would develop this intuition in Le Sang du Pauvre (1909), one of the harshest texts ever written on money and charity.^[21]

Death at Bourg-la-Reine

Leon Bloy died on November 3, 1917, at Bourg-la-Reine,^[22][23] of uremia, surrounded by his wife, daughters and friends. He was still working on his journal, whose final volume bore a prophetic title in the midst of the Great War: Au seuil de l'Apocalypse.^[24][25] A bas-relief of Our Lady of La Salette, the apparition he had venerated all his life, was placed on his tomb. He rests in the cemetery of Bourg-la-Reine, faithful to his poverty and faith until death.

Leon Bloy's work is unclassifiable: novels, pamphlets, exegeses, journals, Marian and Napoleonic meditations answer one another in a unique style — lyrical, biblical, insulting, incandescent. It can be gathered around a few major peaks.

Le Desespere and La Femme pauvre: the two great novels

Le Desespere (1887) is a largely autobiographical novel: its hero, Cain Marchenoir, a miserable and exalted writer, wages a desperate battle against the mediocrity of the literary world. The book settles fierce accounts with his contemporaries, but it also carries an intense meditation on pain and salvation.^[26]

La Femme pauvre (1897) is his masterpiece. It tells the destiny of Clotilde Marechal, a humiliated woman stripped of everything, who discovers in absolute destitution a freedom and a holiness unknown to the rich. The novel ends with the sentence that summarizes all of Bloy's thought, and that Pope Francis would quote a century later:

"There is only one sadness: not to be saints." — Leon Bloy, La Femme pauvre, Mercure de France, 1897, final sentence^[27]

The journals: eighteen years of daily cry

From 1892 until his death, Bloy kept a journal that he published in successive volumes: Le Mendiant ingrat (1898), Mon journal (1904), Quatre ans de captivite a Cochons-sur-Marne (1905), L'Invendable (1909), Le Vieux de la Montagne (1911), Le Pelerin de l'Absolu (1914), Au seuil de l'Apocalypse (1916) and La Porte des Humbles (posthumous, 1920).^[28] This journal, one of the great journals of French literature, combines the chronicle of his poverty, his anger, his spiritual intuitions and pages of blazing beauty. It is there, day after day, that Bloy's soul can be read.

The pamphleteer: Exegese des lieux communs

Bloy is also one of the greatest pamphleteers in the French language. His Exegese des lieux communs (first series 1902, second series 1913) is a masterpiece of irony: in it he dissects the proverbs and cliches of the "bourgeois" — "business is business," "everyone has to live" — in order to reveal their satisfied stupidity and practical atheism.^[29] Behind the corrosive comedy lies a spiritual critique: for Bloy, the commonplace is the language of the man who has renounced the absolute.

Le Salut par les Juifs: Israel at the heart of salvation

In 1892, Bloy published Le Salut par les Juifs (Salvation Through the Jews), an answer to the rising Drumontist antisemitism: Drumont's La France juive had appeared in 1886.^[30][31] The title, drawn from the Gospel of John ("salvation is from the Jews," Jn 4:22), affirms the unique and irreplaceable place of Israel in salvation history: from the very opening, Bloy reproaches Drumont for never having quoted "that simple and formidable saying of Our Lord Jesus Christ."^[32] The Dreyfus Affair, for its part, had not yet begun — Dreyfus would not be arrested until October 15, 1894, and convicted in December^[33] — and his name does not appear in the book. It must be said plainly: this theological defense stands alongside pages of verbal violence that shock, as when Bloy writes of the modern "Youtre" that he "seems to be the confluence of all the hideousness of the world."^[34] Bloy nevertheless sees in the people of the Covenant a permanent sign of God's fidelity.

Here, in synthesis, are Leon Bloy's principal works and what each contributes:

Bloy is not a professional theologian, but a lay mystic whose whole work bears a few powerful spiritual intuitions, deeply Catholic, expressed with rare intensity.

Holiness, the only affair of life

The heart of Bloy's spirituality lies in the conviction that holiness is the only real purpose of existence, and that everything else — money, success, respectability — is dust. This is what the ending of La Femme pauvre says, but also a thousand pages of his journal. For Bloy, failing to become a saint is not a mere imperfection: it is the only failure, the only real sadness. This radicality joins the Church's constant teaching on the universal call to holiness, which the Second Vatican Council would place at the heart of Lumen gentium and which Pope Francis would take up while quoting Bloy precisely.^[35]

The Poor Man is the face of Christ

The second intuition: the poor person is not a social problem, but a sacred presence. In the line of the Gospel ("as you did it to one of the least of these my brethren, you did it to me," Mt 25:40), Bloy sees in the beggar, the humiliated, the hungry, the very place where Christ hides and gives himself. Contempt for the poor is therefore, for him, contempt for God — and money, diverted from the poor, becomes a matter charged with blood.^[36] This burning theology announces, in its excessive way, the Church's social teaching on the dignity of the poor.

Redemptive suffering

The third intuition, the most personal, is that pain is not absurd; it is fruitful. Marked by Anne-Marie Roule's insanity and the death of his sons, Bloy made suffering the knot of his faith. He relates it to the Cross of Christ and to co-redemption: to suffer in union with Christ is to participate in the salvation of the world. Le Desespere says it through the voice of Cain Marchenoir:

"Every earthly thing is ordained for Pain. Now this Pain was, in his eyes, the beginning as it was the end. […] it was the very logic of those mysterious Scriptures, in which he supposed the Will of God was to be read." — Leon Bloy, Le Desespere^[37]

La Salette: the Virgin who weeps

Finally, Bloy was, throughout his life, a fervent devotee of Our Lady of La Salette, the apparition of 1846 — the very year of his birth — in which the weeping Virgin warned the world, and which the Church recognized as authentic on September 19, 1851, through Bishop Philibert de Bruillard, Bishop of Grenoble.^[38] He devoted Celle qui pleure (1908) to her and saw in the Virgin's tears a sign for his time.^[39] Passionate, sometimes excessive in his apocalyptic interpretation of the "secret" of La Salette, he nevertheless remains a witness to this Marian devotion of compunction and mercy. On his tomb, it is still the image of La Salette that keeps watch.

The paradox of Leon Bloy is this: this man reputed to be impossible to frequent, estranged from half the literary world, was also an apostle of astonishing fruitfulness. Around him, intellectuals and artists converted or deepened their faith.

Jacques and Raissa Maritain

The most famous are Jacques and Raissa Maritain. Young students tempted by despair before the materialism of the Sorbonne, they read La Femme pauvre and were overwhelmed.^[40] They met Bloy in 1905 and discovered in him not a lecturer, but a man who lived what he wrote. Raissa would recount in her memoirs, Les Grandes Amities, how decisive this encounter was on their path toward baptism in 1906.^[41]

On June 11, 1906, Jacques and Raissa Maritain, with Vera, Raissa's sister, received baptism in the church of Saint-Jean-l'Evangeliste in Montmartre. Leon Bloy was their godfather.^[42][43] Jacques Maritain would become one of the greatest Catholic philosophers of the twentieth century: through this baptism, Bloy's influence irrigated the whole rebirth of Thomistic thought.

Van der Meer de Walcheren, Rouault and the others

Bloy counts among his godchildren the young Dutch writer Pierre van der Meer de Walcheren and his wife, who would become figures of Dutch Catholicism.^[44] Among his friends was the painter Georges Rouault, whose tragic religious art owes much to their friendship,^[45] and the geologist Pierre Termier, a Catholic scientist, friend and correspondent of Bloy.^[46] Around this penniless beggar there formed a small hearth of conversion whose fruits would mark Catholic art and thought for a long time.

Honesty requires saying that Leon Bloy was also a difficult, unjust and often excessive man. His violence of pen spared neither enemies nor friends; he broke with almost everyone, including Barbey d'Aurevilly and Huysmans, and covered adversaries with insults who did not always deserve them. His apocalyptic interpretation of history, his sometimes delirious reading of numbers and symbols, and his taste for prophetic curse call for prudence: Bloy is not a doctrinal authority, and the Church has never presented him as a model of temperance.

But this excess is part of his witness. Bloy never claimed to be a saint; he only cried, with heartbreaking sincerity, that holiness was the only thing that mattered, and for that conviction he endured a poverty few would have accepted. His excesses are those of a man who refused lukewarmness to the point of being burned by it. That is why one can admire him without canonizing him, and receive his cry without adopting all his angers.

Leon Bloy's influence extends far beyond the circle of his direct readers. He is one of the fathers of the Catholic literary revival that runs through the first half of the twentieth century. His imprint can be found in Georges Bernanos, whose novels of holiness and spiritual combat prolong his intuition; in Charles Peguy, another singer of poverty and hope; in Paul Claudel and Francois Mauriac; and even in the theology of Jacques Maritain.^[47][48] The Bloy line — refusal of bourgeois mediocrity, absolute demand for holiness, beauty saved through pain — irrigates a whole Catholic literature.

A century after his death, Pope Francis's double quotation gave Bloy an unexpected actuality. This poor layman, husband, father, neither saint nor blessed, has become for many the voice that recalls the essential. He wrote it himself: the one thing not to miss in a life is holiness. The rest, he would have said, is only noise on the threshold of eternity.

• Our Lady of La Salette: the apparition of 1846 that Leon Bloy venerated all his life — Our Lady of La Salette.
• Dante Alighieri, another great Christian poet of the absolute whom Bloy admired — Dante Alighieri.
• Jacques Maritain and Raissa Maritain, his godchildren and philosophical heirs — Jacques Maritain, Raissa Maritain.
• Georges Bernanos, Charles Peguy, Paul Claudel: literary heirs of the Catholic revival — Georges Bernanos, Charles Peguy, Paul Claudel.
• Ernest Hello, his second spiritual master — Ernest Hello.