Bøker av Léon Bloy

Edition originale non censurée. La grande affaire de Bloy est d''être le contempteur d''un monde, d''un siècle, d''une humanité même, dont il se sent et se veut le banni - "je souffre une violence infinie et les colères qui sortent de moi ne sont que des échos, singulièrement affaiblis, d''une Imprécation supérieure que j''ai l''étonnante disgrâce de répercuter", met-il dans la bouche de Caïn Marchenoir. L''horreur que lui inspire la déchéance du Christ dans l''Eglise, dont il exhausse un anticléricalisme ravageur, la honte où il tient tout ce qui peut s''apparenter à la moindre compromission avec la société de son temps, l''effroyable mélancolie où le plonge cette intuition que les humains ne trouveront jamais leur bon plaisir que dans le reniement d''un Idéal et dans la consommation de la jouissance, sans l''once d''un souci de justice sociale et spirituelle ("je suis en communion d''impatience avec tous les révoltés, tous les déçus, tous les inexaucés, tous les damnés de ce monde"), font de lui un de ces êtres inapaisables, taraudés par la douleur de vivre et la souffrance d''être. Son génie aura peut-être été de donner à cet apocalyptisme une forme de sublimité, une expression qui doit autant à son mysticisme qu''au réalisme le plus cru.

She Who Weeps by Léon Bloy (Celle qui pleure, in French) was originally published in 1908. This is a new English translation of a work that is arguably a keystone of religious thought in Bloyʼs canon, given the authorʼs strong belief in, and promotion of, not only Mariology but also Millenarianism, both which beliefs permeate his work. Originally begun in 1880, before his articles written as a scatalogical demolitionary pamphleteer for the Chat Noir journal, before his ground-breaking first novel, The Desperate Man, which was, by the authorʼs own admission, the beginning of the "conspiration of silence" against him - She Who Weeps was surprisingly abandoned at first. It was only later when Pierre Termier, a lay "ambassador of Mary," and close friend of the author in his later years, approached Bloy about the work, that the latter, encouraged, and with rekindled interest, picked it up again and brought it to completion.It discusses the story of Mélanie Calvat, and also Maximin Giraud, two children-shepherds in the French Alps, witnesses to the Apparition of the Very Holy Virgin Mary on September 19, 1846, - twelve years before the more famous Marian Apparition at Lourdes - and the consequences that the event had on the lives of the two children - particularly Mélanie, who devoted her life to promoting the message."Pass it on to all my My People, the Mother of God had said to the Shepherds, having announced to them the Great News..."

Blood of the Poor (originally Le Sang du pauvre), by Catholic writer Léon Bloy, is perhaps the hardest to read of Léon Bloyʼs writings, as it goes straight to the heart of the matter of what is wrong in the world. It is hard to read, emotively, because it gives the honest reader no room for cover, no space for shelter, no shadow of a tree to hide behind. With avarice as its subject, it is a dark poem in prose, a sermon in the style of Savonarola, with the biting satire of a Jonathan Swift."The Blood and the Flesh of the Poor are the only aliments that can nourish, the substance of the rich being a poison and a putrefaction. It is therefore a necessity of hygiene that the poor be devoured by the rich who find that very good, and who ask for it again. Rich children are fortified by the juice of the poorsʼ flesh, and the rich manʼs cuisine is endowed with concentrate of the poor.""You believe yourselves to be innocent because you have not slit somebodyʼs throat, as yet, I want to believe; because you have not forced open somebodyʼs door nor scaled his wall in order to despoil him of his possessions; because finally you have not transgressed human laws too visibly. You are so gross, so carnal, for you do not conceive of a crime that cannot be seen. But I say to you, my very dear brother, that you are a plant, and that that assassin is your flower." "It is true that there are refuges: drunkenness, prostitution of the body, suicide, or madness. Why would the dance not continue?"

"Originally published as Sueur de sang in 1893."--Title page verso.

The Words of a Demolitions Contractor (originally Propos d'un Entrepreneur de Démolitions), published in 1884, is a collection of articles written by French author Léon Bloy, previously published in the columns of various Parisian journals between the years 1882 and 1884 - the Chat Noir journal principally, but also the Gils Blas, the Figaro, the Nouvelle Revue, and Le Petit Caporal. Selected by the author himself, they represent Léon Bloy at his earliest and fiery best as a thunderous, irascible, intransigent Catholic pamphleteer and polemicist. These are the articles that earned him his reputation, and these are the articles that essentially torpedoed his career. So maligned and hated was he from the start, that his reputation as an author still suffers. But as the dust settles after nearly 150 years, in retrospect, Léon Bloy stands out as a beacon of righteousness, a Parisian Diogenes, shedding the light of his genius and rancor on the ills plaguing Paris and France at the time - during the Belle Epoque and the years leading up to the two world wars.It is hard to discover a writer of such intensity, love and disgust, pathos, anger, and parody - in any language, at any period of time, in the history of Western literature. Imagine the gloom and despair of Dostoevsky, mixed with the prophesy and thunder of an Old Testament prophet, throw in the biting wit of Jonathan Swift - shake it up and let it sit for a minute - and there you have him: Léon Bloy.

Thirty tales of theft, onanism, incest, murder and a host of other forms of perversion and cruelty from the "ungrateful beggar" and "pilgrim of the absolute," Laeon Bloy. "Disagreeable Tales," first published in French in 1894, collects Bloy's narrative sermons from the depths: a cauldron of frightful anecdotes and inspired misanthropy that represents a high point of the French Decadent movement and the most emblematic entry into the library of the "Cruel Tale" christened by Villiers de l'Isle-Adam. Whether depicting parents and offspring being sacrificed for selfish gains, or imbeciles sacrificing their own individuality on a literary whim, these tales all draw sustenance from an underlying belief: the root of religion is crime against man, nature and God, and that in this hell on earth, even the worst among us has a soul.

Written and published in 1884, Léon Bloyʼs The Revealer of the Globe: Christopher Columbus and His Future Beatification is an attempt by the author to renew the Cause for Canonization of Christopher Columbus. This is part one of that work. It includes a preface by Jules Barbey dʼAurevilly. To read this book today feels sometimes like reading a book written only yesterday. Christopher Columbus represents the West and Western Civilization as no other person before him can or ever will. And everyone else, intra or extra muros, those who do not subscribe to that civilization but inherit all its benefits - they are the angry, ingrateful hordes some of whom, quite clearly, do not know what they do, nor what their actions imply. Léon Bloy says it best when he says: "The prejudice against Christopher Columbus is so tenacious and so strong that the greatest poet in the world, supposing him inspired by the most magnificent of all indignations, would never succeed in overcoming it.""Doubtless also, he had to believe that that captive world would not be handed over to him without a fight and his heroic soul counted on the God of the oppressed to decide his fortune. But the extraordinary injustice, the unprecedented ingratitude, the indefatigable persistence of misfortunes as he had never seen before and, above all, the supernatural, absolute, implacable insuccess of all his efforts - with the exception of the Discovery, - that there must have strangely astonished his soul, which was unique among the unique!"

Clothilde est née dans la misère ouvrière du Second Empire et a toujours été inspirée par sa foi chrétienne. Mariée à un ivrogne qui l¿oblige à se prostituer pour subvenir aux besoins du couple, elle rencontre Leopold, un peintre qui n¿hésite pas à jouer le rôle de protecteur auprès de la jeune femme. Mais la mort prématurée de celui-ci entraînera Clothilde au fond de la misère...

Ce roman écrit à la fin du 19ème siècle décrit la vie de Clothilde, jeune femme, née dans la misère ouvrière du Second Empire, mais inspirée par sa foi chrétienne. Son compagnon, un ivrogne, l’oblige à se prostituer pour subvenir à leurs besoins. Elle se retrouve sous la protection de Leopold, peintre et bienfaiteur. Ce dernier meurt dans des circonstances obscures. Clothilde toucha le fond de la misère et de la souffrance et meurt avec une auréole de sainteté...

Publié pour la première fois en 1905, ce recueil de textes rédigés entre 1884 et 1900, est d'une acuité rare. Bloy dénonce comme à son habitude la société bienséante et moutonienne qui crédite les belluaires et les porchers, Bloy se définit comme « un très humble et très ingénu vociférateur. » dont le dessein est de « dénoncer les improbes en littérature : ceux qui volent et ceux qui rampent. Car ces deux espèces menacent de tout dévorer. »

L'épopée byzantine et Gustave Schlumberger / Léon BloyDate de l'édition originale: 1906Le présent ouvrage s'inscrit dans une politique de conservation patrimoniale des ouvrages de la littérature Française mise en place avec la BNF. HACHETTE LIVRE et la BNF proposent ainsi un catalogue de titres indisponibles, la BNF ayant numérisé ces oeuvres et HACHETTE LIVRE les imprimant à la demande. Certains de ces ouvrages reflètent des courants de pensée caractéristiques de leur époque, mais qui seraient aujourd'hui jugés condamnables. Ils n'en appartiennent pas moins à l'histoire des idées en France et sont susceptibles de présenter un intérêt scientifique ou historique. Le sens de notre démarche éditoriale consiste ainsi à permettre l'accès à ces oeuvres sans pour autant que nous en cautionnions en aucune façon le contenu. Pour plus d'informations, rendez-vous sur www.hachettebnf.fr

Constantinople et Byzance / Léon BloyDate de l'édition originale: 1917Le présent ouvrage s'inscrit dans une politique de conservation patrimoniale des ouvrages de la littérature Française mise en place avec la BNF. HACHETTE LIVRE et la BNF proposent ainsi un catalogue de titres indisponibles, la BNF ayant numérisé ces oeuvres et HACHETTE LIVRE les imprimant à la demande. Certains de ces ouvrages reflètent des courants de pensée caractéristiques de leur époque, mais qui seraient aujourd'hui jugés condamnables. Ils n'en appartiennent pas moins à l'histoire des idées en France et sont susceptibles de présenter un intérêt scientifique ou historique. Le sens de notre démarche éditoriale consiste ainsi à permettre l'accès à ces oeuvres sans pour autant que nous en cautionnions en aucune façon le contenu. Pour plus d'informations, rendez-vous sur www.hachettebnf.fr