Joseph Hilaire Pierre René Belloc (27 July 1870 – 16 July 1953)

Belloc was born in La Celle-Saint-Cloud France (next to Versailles and near Paris) to a French father and English mother, and grew up in England.

no 1404 of 1250 in england and 400 in the United States



Hilaire Belloc was born in 1870 in a village a dozen miles from Paris a few days before the start of the Franco-Prussian war. Because of the war, he and his sister were taken to England and when the family returned to their home at the end of the war, they found it utterly vandalised by the occupying German troops. This in some measure, explains his life-long hostility to all things German.

He returned to England and was educated at the Oratory School Birmingham, under Cardinal Newman, and later at Balliol College, Oxford, but before Balliol he went back to France to honour what he saw as an obligation to do his military service there, though he was not legally required to. His experience in the artillery influenced him strongly and, like another of his great loves, the sea, never seems far from his mind in his writings.

He was stationed in a front line town toul, Perhaps wrote the poem "en bivorac" at this time