First published in French in 1893, Sweating Blood describes the
atrocities of war in 30 tales of horror and inhumanity from the pen of
the Pilgrim of the Absolute, Léon Bloy. Writing with blood, sweat, tears
and moral outrage, Bloy drew from anecdotes, news reports and his own
experiences as a guerilla fighter to compose a fragmented depiction of
the 1870 Franco-Prussian War, told with equal measures of hatred and
pathos, and alternating between cutting detail and muted anguish. From
heaps of corpses, monstrous butchers, cowardly bourgeois, bloody
massacres, seas of mud, drunken desperation, frightful disfigurement,
grotesque hallucinations and ghoulish means of personal revenge, a
generalized portrait of suffering is revealed that ultimately requires a
religious lens: for through Bloy's maniacal nationalism and frenetic
Catholicism, it is a hell that emerges here, a 19th-century apocalypse
that tore a country apart and set the stage for a century of atrocities
that were yet to come. Léon Bloy (1846-1917) was born to a
freethinking yet stern father and a pious Spanish-Catholic mother in
southwestern France. Nourishing anti-religious sentiments in his youth,
his outlook changed radically when he moved to Paris and came under the
influence of Jules-Amédée Barbey d'Aurevilly. In his subsequent years of
writing pamphlets, novels, essays, poetry and a multi volume diary, Bloy
earned his dual nicknames of The Pilgrim of the Absolute through his
unorthodox devotion to the Catholic Church and The Ungrateful Beggar
through his endless reliance on the charity of friends to support him
and his family.
