Historical figure of the day

[Baluarte]

For many years now, I've always preferred to discover a new historical figure than a new real life acquaintance.
I find the old and longdead figures more charming and interesting.

As such, I'd like to open a thread so that each day, at least a new name (ideally not very known) is referenced in this topic.
Post the people whose lives and works may have contributed to your own personal development, or that at least seem curious and interesting.

You can also comment on the characters posted by myself and other people, sharing your opinion on them.
Ideally, it should be a smooth yet frequently renewed discussion.

I'll start myself:

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Jules Amédée Barbey d'Aurevilly



Jules-Amédée Barbey d'Aurevilly (2 November 1808 – 23 April 1889) was a French novelist and short story writer. He specialised in mystery tales that explored hidden motivation and hinted at evil without being explicitly concerned with anything supernatural. He had a decisive influence on writers such as Auguste Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, Henry James and Marcel Proust.

Jules-Amédée Barbey — the d'Aurevilly was a later inheritance from a childless uncle — was born at Saint-Sauveur-le-Vicomte, Manche in Lower Normandy. In 1827 he went to the Collège Stanislas de Paris. After getting his baccalauréat in 1829, he went to Caen University to study law, taking his degree three years later.

As a young man, he was a liberal and an atheist, and his early writings present religion as something that meddles in human affairs only to complicate and pervert matters. In the early 1840s, however, he began to frequent the Catholic and legitimist salon of Baroness Amaury de Maistre, niece of Joseph de Maistre. In 1846 he converted to Roman Catholicism.

His greatest successes as a literary writer date from 1852 onwards, when he became an influential literary critic at the Bonapartist paper Le Pays, helping to rehabilitate Balzac and effectually promoting Stendhal, Flaubert, and Baudelaire. Paul Bourget describes Barbey as an idealist, who sought and found in his work a refuge from the uncongenial ordinary world. Jules Lemaître, a less sympathetic critic, thought the extraordinary crimes of his heroes and heroines, his reactionary opinions, his dandyism and snobbery were a caricature of Byronism.

Beloved of fin-de-siècle decadents, Barbey d'Aurevilly remains an example of the extremes of late romanticism. Barbey d'Aurevilly held extreme Catholic opinions, yet wrote about risqué subjects, a contradiction apparently more disturbing to the English than to the French themselves. Barbey d'Aurevilly was also known as a dandy artisan of his own persona, adopting an aristocratic style and hinting at a mysterious past, though his parentage was provincial bourgeois nobility, and his youth comparatively uneventful.

Inspired by the character and ambience of Valognes, he set his works in the society of Normand aristocracy. Although he himself did not use the Norman patois, his example encouraged the revival of vernacular literature in his home region.

Jules-Amédée Barbey d'Aurevilly died in Paris and was buried in the cimetière de Montparnasse. During 1926 his remains were transferred to the churchyard in Saint-Sauveur-le-Vicomte.
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I admit I was very lazy and just copied the English Wikipedia version of his biography. The French version is far richer and more exact, but alas I was too lazy to translate it.
You can check it if you want to though:

http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jules_A...'Aurevilly

[Baluarte]

I'm curious, had anyone heard of him before?

[Baluarte]

Léon Bloy (July 11, 1846 – November 3, 1917), was a French novelist, essayist, pamphleteer and poet.



Bloy was born in Notre-Dame-de-Sanilhac, in the arondissement of Périgueux, Dordogne. He was the second of six sons of Voltairean freethinker and stern disciplinarian Jean Baptiste Bloy and his wife Anne-Marie Carreau, pious Spanish-Catholic daughter of a Napoleonic soldier

After an agnostic and unhappy youth in which he cultivated an intense hatred for the Roman Catholic Church and its teaching,[1] his father found him a job in Paris, where he went in 1864. In December 1868, he met the aging Catholic author Barbey d'Aurevilly, who lived opposite him in rue Rousselet and became his mentor. Shortly afterwards, he underwent a dramatic religious conversion.

Bloy's works reflect a deepening devotion to the Catholic Church and most generally a tremendous craving for the Absolute. His devotion to religion resulted in a complete dependence on charity; he acquired his nickname ("the ungrateful beggar") as a result of the many letters requesting financial aid from friends, acquaintances, and complete strangers, all the while carrying on with his literary work, in which his eight-volume Diary takes an important place.

Bloy was a friend of the author Joris-Karl Huysmans, the painter Georges Rouault, and the philosopher Jacques Maritain, and was instrumental in reconciling these intellectuals with Roman Catholicism. However, he acquired a reputation for bigotry because of his frequent outbursts of temper; and his first novel, Le Désespéré, a fierce attack on rationalism and those he believed to be in league with it, made him fall out with the literary community of his time and even many of his old friends. Soon, Bloy could count such prestigious authors as Emile Zola, Guy de Maupassant, Ernest Renan, Alphonse Daudet, Joris-Karl Huysmans, Paul Bourget and Anatole France as his enemies.

In addition to his published works, he left a large body of correspondence with public and literary figures. He died in Bourg-la-Reine.

Influence

Bloy is quoted in the epigraph at the beginning of Graham Greene's novel The End of the Affair, and in the essay "The Mirror of Enigmas", by the Argentine writer, Jorge Luis Borges, who acknowledged his debt to him by naming him in the Foreword to his short story collection "Artifices" as one of seven authors who were in "the heterogeneous list of the writers I am continually re-reading". In his novel The Harp and the Shadow, Alejo Carpentier excoriates Bloy as a raving, Columbus-defending lunatic during Vatican deliberations over the explorer's canonization. Bloy is also quoted at the beginning of John Irving's A Prayer for Owen Meany, and there are several quotations from his Letters to my Fiancée in Charles Williams's anthology The New Christian Year. Le Désespéré was republished in 2005 by Editions Underbahn with a preface by Maurice G. Dantec. Pope Francis quoted Bloy in his inaugural address to the cardinal electors after his election in 2013, saying "Anyone who does not pray to the Lord prays to the devil."

[xajapa]

I'm curious, had anyone heard of him before?

Not I.

[Baluarte]

I bought a couple of days ago "Le Salut par les Juifs".

For what I know, Bloy develops the following thesis there:

Jews are the most disgusting thing to have ever walked the Earth, but we must not hate them, since they are an essential part of God's plan.
They were created to absorb all the evil and disgusting things of the world so that the gentiles may be saved, and given a chance to reach Heaven and God's realm.

More or less how local whores fulfill an essential role providing men with a possibility to release their lowest desires/fetishes, while sparing the wives from that.
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Looking forward to read the whole thing

[Kazimiera]

Historical figure for the day is Otto von Bismarck. It is his birthday today!

[Baluarte]

Best European diplomat alongside Talleyrand

[Smaland]

Jean de Lattre de Tassigny, Marshal of France (1889-1952)

... he commanded French troops in Indochina during the First Indochina War. He won three major victories at Vinh Yen, Mao khé and Yen Cu Ha and defended successfully the north of the country against the Viet Minh ...

Full Wiki article

[Baluarte]

Alphonse Toussenel



Alphonse Toussenel (March 17, 1803 - April 30, 1885) was a French naturalist, writer and journalist born in Montreuil-Bellay, a small meadows commune of Angers; he died in Paris on April 30, 1885.

A utopian socialist and a disciple of Charles Fourier, he was anglophobic and anti-semitic. He was at one time editor-in-chief of the newspaper La Paix, and his studies of natural history served as a vehicle for his political ideas. He was also the brother of teacher and translator Théodore Toussenel.

Quotes

« L'ours symbolise l'esprit de rétrogradation systématique et d'anarchie incorrigible qui prohibe la clémence. L'ours est en effet l'incarnation vivante de l'hostilité au progrès et la protestation armée des prétendus droits de la bête contre l'autorité de l'homme. » L'Esprit des bêtes.
« Toutes les fois qu'il s'agit de faire un mauvais coup, la mauvaise bête est là. Les mœurs du Renard, curieuses à étudier, sont la peinture exacte de celles d'une foule de civilisés de bas étage, et notamment du voleur à la tire, du filou, de l'escroc, du débitant félon. Si les animaux tiennent jamais boutique, je parie tout ce qu'on voudra que c'est un Renard qui sera premier boutiquier. » L'Esprit des bêtes.
« Tous les liseurs de Bible, qu'on les appelle Juifs ou Genevois, Hollandais, Anglais, Américains, ont dû trouver écrit dans leur livre de prières que Dieu avait concédé aux serviteurs de sa loi le monopole de l'exploitation du globe, car tous ces peuples mercantiles apportent, dans l'art de rançonner le genre humain, la même ferveur de fanatisme religieux. C'est pourquoi je comprends les persécutions que les Romains, les Chrétiens et les Mahometans ont fait subir aux Juifs. La répulsion universelle que le juif a inspirée si longtemps n'était que la juste punition de son implacable orgueil, et nos mépris les représailles légitimes de la haine qu’il semblait porter au reste de l’humanité. » Les juifs rois de l'époque,histoire de la féodalité financière.