Catholic writer and thinker Hilaire Belloc, even now nearly a century after his death, is a pillar of the faith.
Several of his observations, while perhaps not as incisive and witty as his close friend Chesterton, were nevertheless powerful and poignant:
“Europe is the Faith and the Faith is Europe.” - Belloc
Belloc represents full-throated defenses of not just the Catholic faith, but also of Catholic history. I enjoy the intellectual playfulness of Chesterton, but I also appreciate the bluntness and directness of Belloc. The two complement one another but could not be confused for one another.
“All men have an instinct for conflict; at least, all healthy men.” - Belloc
Belloc took no prisoners in his writing.
If you want to unpack all the lies by mainstream moderns, Belloc’s books exist like a ticking time bomb waiting to be unpacked.
The man wrote children’s books, scholarly works, novels. He was a publishing house of one.
The man invented a new economic system model with his friends.
Which was also a convenient way to smear Belloc by denying him credit for the economic theory.
What does it say about a man that his work is nearly a century old and thus hopelessly out-of-date, rendered esoteric by the mainstream, ignored by his detractors, and yet his ideas are still gnawing away intellectually at the supposed best thinkers on the opposite political spectrum even as they face their deathbeds?
To be fair, some of Belloc’s work suffers from being so oriented at proving his points that the points lose some of their timelessness. Meaning that, his works were likely effective critiques of prevalent thinking in the 1920s, but as a century passes behind his work the arguments he was pushing against are less clear. Some of his works feel like a timely argument stuck in that time period. Other works of his seem a bit muted, in that their ultimate conclusions and observations seem like they aren’t fully realized. He’s pulling his punches in a few works.
As an illustrative example, I recall some of his writing where he disputed the notion of spirits, demons, and ghosts in a conversation with Chesterton. They clearly felt as though it was just the remnant of folk superstition, which seems odd coming from someone who was so grounded in the faith. It’s hard to say whether he actually thought there were no such things as spirits, or whether he was just being guarded given that the arrogant modernism of the age made that the avante garde on the topic.
The man is still a world champion.
Belloc was born in 1870, on July 20, in an outer suburb of Paris, La Celle-Saint-Cloud. His full regal name was: Joseph Hilaire Pierre René Belloc. The city is now home to Marine Le Pen.
Belloc was one of two children born to Bessie Rayner Parkes (1829-1925) and Louis Belloc (1830-1872).
Louis Belloc’s father, Hilaire’s grandfather, was the French painter Jean-Hilaire Belloc.
“Young Couple” by Jean Hilaire Belloc (1786-1866), dated 1825.
Louis was a barrister who was half French and half Irish. Bessie was a Barrister’s daughter who was very liberal and considered a prominent feminist in her time.
Bessie and Louis married when Bessie was 38, and were together only five years until Louis passed in 1872.
Louis died while they were on holiday at Auvergne in central France and the cause was listed as sunstroke.
Bessie was left to care for four year old Marie and two year old Hilaire. Hilaire’s only sibling, was his sister Marie Adelaide Elizabeth Rayner Belloc (1868-1947). Sister Marie, in 1896, married Frederick Sawrey A. Lowndes (1868-1940) and a son and two daughters with him.
Hilaire’s wife Elodie Belloc (1868-1914)
Belloc married Elodie Agnes Hogan in 1896. Elodie, born in 1868, died on February 2, 1914. Elodie and Hilaire are buried together at Our Lady Of Consolation and St Francis in West Sussex, England.
I found this somewhat sweet write-up of their romance together at her FindAGrave page:
Elodie Hogan was a native of Napa, in California, although both of her parents were born in Ireland. In 1889, she was on her first visit to Europe, with her sister and her parents, when she met and fell in love with the young Hilaire Belloc. When she returned to California, Belloc sailed to New York and crossed the continent in order to be with her ; but, on her mother's urging, she refused him. They continued to correspond throughout Belloc's service in the French Army and his time at Oxford University. After this, he returned to the States, only to find that Elodie's parents had died and that she was on the point of becoming a nun. Happily, he persuaded her against this course of action, and they were married on the 15th. June 1896, at St. John the Baptist's Church in Napa. After a brief honeymoon in Geysers, Sonoma County, they returned to England. They had five children : Louis, Eleanor (who married Rex Jebb, q.v.), Hilary, Elizabeth and Peter (q.v.). At the end of 1913, Elodie was taken ill what was, presumably, cancer. During this illness, her English accent, which she had taken some pains to cultivate, disappeared and she reverted to her Californian tongue. By the 23rd. December, she was unable to swallow her food; and, on the 2nd. February, she died. The next day, the door to her room was locked. For the remaining 39 years of Hilaire Belloc's lifetime, no-one entered her room, and he never passed her door without pausing to kiss it and trace upon it the sign of the cross.
So a French-born British-soldier, writer, and statesman finds an American wife who is entirely Irish right before she enters the convent, they start an intercontinental romance.
Louis Belloc died in the Great War that was not so great, in 1918 in the battlefields of France. His body was never identified, if it was recovered. He died at age 20, childless.
Eleanor Belloc married Reginald Jebb (1883-1977). They were married in 1922 in Westminster Cathedral, and Reginald remained an Anglican during the first part of their marriage, until he gave it up and converted. She had four children:
Marianne Jebb (d. Oct. 12, 2009)
Philip Vincent Bellow “Pip” Jebb (March 15, 1927 - April 7, 1995)
Anthony Jebb (1932 - June 8, 2014)
Julian Jebb (April 2, 1934 - October 30, 1984)
The Jebb family owned the Belloc family home, Kingsland, until 1980 or 1981.
Marianne, who died in 2009, was a nun and died childless.
Philip Jebb married Lucy Margaret Pollen Jebb (1932-2014) and had one child: Louis Jebb (b. 1959). There is a Louis Jebb who writes for “The Art Newspaper” but I am not sure if it is the same one. Philip was an architect.
Anthony Jebb, who went by the name Philip, because the Dominican Order insisted upon it even though he had an older brother of the same name.
Julian Jebb was the producer of arts programmes with the BBC. He made noted documentaries of Virginia Woolf and of the Mitford sisters. One of Hilaire’s biographers who knew Julian related that he had a ‘love-hate’ relationship with the legacy of Hilaire, and had given up on “the Catholic thing.” Sadly, he died by suicide at his home in Ladbroke Grove on October 30, 1984. He left the world without a spouse and without children.
Elizabeth Belloc (1900-1967) was one of Hilaire’s daughters, and was a writer like her father. It appears she did not marry and died childless in 1967. I cannot find any obituaries for her.
Elizabeth’s last mention on Newspapers.com is from 1954 when she is acknowledged as a translator for the work, Christ in Our Time.
Considering that her father had died the prior July, perhaps the joy of writing and getting his input and feedback lessened the appeal for future writing endeavors. A quick scan on Worldcat.org also added a few journal articles, but her output essentially ends, except for one article, after her father’s death.
Hilary Belloc married Frances Gunnison “Hope” Bartnett Belloc (1895-1970). He remarried Helen who survived his death in 1977. Hilary had one son, Marc John Belloc of Corte Madera, who attended medical school in Rome, Italy. I can’t find any more details about Marc Belloc, possibly a doctor now.
There is a Jean Marc Belloc who died in France. This might be him.
Peter Belloc was born in 1904 and died in the second “Great War” in 1941. He caught a cold while at sea and, while hospitalized, it grew and eventually took his life. Peter married Stella Benson (1901-1989) in 1927. It appears they had at least one daughter together, Mona Barbara Belloc Eustace (1930-1995), who married Rowland Barrington Eustace (1924-1998).
Mona Barbara Eustace was married on August 2, 1950 at St. James’s, Spanish Place. At the time of their wedding, Rowland Eustace was the assistant registrar at Oxford University. Rowland was a veteran of the Normandy invasion, politically ‘left of center’ and came from a military family. Rowland was heavily involved in transitioning Kenya from white to black rule in its university systems. He led a think-tank that was abolished by Margaret Thatcher. Barbara and Rowland had a daughter born in about 1951, and a son, born on July 6, 1954, and three other daughters. Rowland died in London on June 26, 1998.
THE BELLOC CHILDREN IN SUMMARY—————————————-
So, just in case you’re keeping count, Hilaire and Elodie had five children, who then produced six total grandchildren, who then ended up with seven total great-grandchildren.
The generational math, starting with Hilaire and Elodie, is 2:5:6:7.
Which is good, in that the Belloc bloodline lives in. But it is certainly no powerful familial witness about Catholic natalism.
Just as his descendents are not prolific, neither were the sales of his books in his lifetime. Belloc’s final estate did not end up with a princely sum when probated.
THE BELLOC LEGACY——————————————————————
Belloc was not a ‘best seller’ and when he died, he only left his land which went to his sole surviving son Hilary, and £7,090 split among the three siblings. The press made a significant deal about this. For comparison, this is about $270,565 in inflation adjusted U.S. dollars in 2024.
Most of his life was reportedly spent at the family home, called “King’s Land” in Sussex. It was on five acres and featured a working windmill. He bought it for £1,000 in 1907, which is about $187,000 in 2024 U.S. dollars.
“Money gives me pleasure all the time.”- Belloc
King’s Land in Sussex.
If you were in the south of England, you could find the location by looking for the maps address for the “Shipley Windmill” - supposedly there is a small museum to Belloc nearby and the home itself is still held in the family.
In doing this research I definitely came to see Belloc as much more ‘blue collar’ in our American lexicon than previously. Perhaps that’s just the bias that all things British are perceptively upper crust.
The legacy of Belloc is hard to rate. I think the moderns all find reason to ‘cancel’ him for their own petty reasons. He offers a great defense of Catholicism, and his stridency for the faith is evident. He still manages to offend powerful elites who do not share his passion for Catholicism.
On some level, Belloc seems as though he is an esoteric obscurity for traditionalist Catholics, an author relevant only to a small select subculture. Yet in reviewing biographies written about Belloc, they are still being produced.
Here are but a few:
"Hilaire Belloc: The Man and His Work" by C. Creighton Mandell and Edward Shanks (1916)
"Old Thunder: A Life of Hilaire Belloc" by Joseph Pearce (2002)
“Hilaire Belloc: A Biography” by A.N. Wilson (2004)
“The Essential Belloc: A Prophet for our Times” by Brian Robertson (2010)
“Hilaire Belloc: The Politics of Living” by Chris Hare (2023)
It’s hard to render one irrelevant who is still generating interest and biographers.
The man had twelve works of his come out posthumously, and the most recent one was in 2006, 53 years after his death. Is this the mind of a great thinker, a great public intellectual, a defender of the faith, or a man with literary aggression and a lot of AD/HD?
One interesting note of Belloc’s legacy, and how his family name continues through the ages, is that Steven Spielberg made the main villain in “Raiders of the Lost Ark” a Frenchman who aids the Germans named Rene Belloq.
Just to be clear, Hilaire’s full name was Rene Belloc: Joseph Hilaire Pierre René Belloc.
Spielberg goes out of his way, online commenters have noted, to disparage Catholics. Not only is Indiana Jones’ arch-nemesis a Frenchman named Belloq enabling German spiritual conquest, but the Italian lawyer in Jurassic Park recites the Hail Mary after abandoning the children in his car to hide on the toilet.
If he were still around, one can only wonder what Hilaire would have made of such defamation to the faithful.
Said of Belloc, “no man of our time has fought so consistently for the good things.”
I asked ChatGPT to estimate how many published words it is estimated that Belloc wrote. It came up with 10.7 million published words. The same estimate for Shakespeare rendered a guess as to about 1.02 million words, and for Jules Verne, about 5.6 million words. For Stephen King, it estimated 11.85 million words.
“Of all fatiguing, futile, empty trades, the worst, I suppose, is writing about writing.” - Belloc
So, Belloc was as prolific as Stephen King, generally speaking. But instead of getting high on cocaine and pounding out 150,000 words in a long weekend in the same genre, as is King’s specialty, Belloc was writing non-fiction and historical works that relies on accuracy and precision.
Chesterton is estimated at 12.6 million, Tolkien at 2.76 million, C.S. Lewis at 2.8 million, and George Bernard Shaw at 4 million.
Those words perhaps came out easily considering he was a widower at such a relatively young age when Elodie died in 1914. It’s conceivable the writing became a bit of a salve for his grief, especially after the loss of his son Louis four years later and the inability to know the details, where he fell, and what happened to his body.
There is a spot at the Arras Flying Memorial where Louis’ name is memorialized, along with thousands of others.
The Flying Memorial is this one pillar. The rest of the memorial, the Arras Memorial in France, commemorates the nearly 35,000 dead for whom no known grave or body was ever recovered.
Walking through this memorial will make you a pacifist.
“When I am dead, I hope it may be said: His sins were scarlet, but his books were read.” - Belloc
When talking about Belloc, the size and scale of that output is simply not emphasized enough. This was a man who tackled an enormous scope on major topics.
Yet one wonders how many millions of those words, or perhaps all of them, he would have given up to have either of his sons back from the dead in the preventable European wars of the 20th century.
from a reader via message: "Good, probably ventured into the sperg side with the amount of info about his children, but I think your conclusion on his importance today rings true and it made for good reading."
from a reader: "I was a fan of Belloc when I was in high school and college…until I caught him lying and came to realize that much of his historical writing bears a closer resemblance to literature like his children’s stories."
![The Crusades: The World's Debate [Book]](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!zGkn!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F16231180-a670-4b57-95dc-5ca0f943cda5_667x1000.jpeg "The Crusades: The World's Debate [Book]")
from a reader via message: "Good, probably ventured into the sperg side with the amount of info about his children, but I think your conclusion on his importance today rings true and it made for good reading."
from a reader: "I was a fan of Belloc when I was in high school and college…until I caught him lying and came to realize that much of his historical writing bears a closer resemblance to literature like his children’s stories."