Hilaire Belloc

Hilaire Belloc (1870–1953) was an Anglo-French writer, historian, and Liberal Member of Parliament whose more than one hundred fifty books ranged across light verse, polemical journalism, Catholic apologetics, and topographical travel. He is remembered today chiefly for the children's verse of The Bad Child's Book of Beasts and Cautionary Tales for Children.

Joseph Hilaire Pierre René Belloc was born on 27 July 1870 in La Celle-Saint-Cloud, near Paris, days before the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War. His father Louis Belloc was a French barrister and his mother Bessie Rayner Parkes an English campaigner for women's suffrage. Louis died in 1872 and Bessie raised the children in Sussex.

He served as a French artillery driver during his national military service in 1891, then read history at Balliol College, Oxford, taking a first in 1895 and presiding over the Oxford Union. He naturalised as a British subject in 1902 and won the South Salford parliamentary seat for the Liberals in 1906, holding it until 1910.

His prolific output included the satirical novel Mr Petre, the four-volume History of England, biographies of Danton, Robespierre, Marie-Antoinette, and Cromwell, the travel classic The Path to Rome, and the economic tract The Servile State. He collaborated closely with G. K. Chesterton, prompting Shaw's coinage "Chesterbelloc." Bessie's death in 1925 followed his wife Elodie's in 1914; he died at Guildford on 16 July 1953.

His name Hilaire derives from the Latin Hilarius, from hilaris meaning "cheerful" or "glad." Hilaire is a French masculine name borne by several early saints and used in France since the Middle Ages.