Belloc, Hilaire (Joseph Hilaire Pierre Belloc) [key], 1870–1953, English author, b. France. He became a British subject in 1902, and from 1906 to 1910 was a Liberal member of Parliament for South Salford. Poet, essayist, satirist, and historian, he wrote from the Roman Catholic viewpoint. Among his works are The Bad Child's Book of Beasts (1896), The Path to Rome (1902), Marie Antoinette (1910), The Jews (1922), The Cruise of the Nona (1925), and Napoleon (1922). He was a close friend of G. K. Chesterton and with him founded the New Witness, a weekly political newspaper. Christened “the Chesterbelloc” by G. B. Shaw, the two were the inventors and propagators of distributism, a medieval, anticapitalist, and anti-Fabian socialist philosophy.
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