Constituency : Salford South 1906-10
Hilaire took Salford South from the Tories by a fairly narrow margin to become the most colourful of the new intake.
Hilaire was born in France but his mother was English. His father died early and his mother brought the children to England. He was educated at John Henry Newman's Oratory School then served in an artillery unit as a French citizen before going to Oxford. He was a big man and a keen walker. He married an American girl. He contributed to the 1897 book Essays in Liberalism , revealing that his hero was Cobbett rather than Cobden. He became a naturalised citizen in 1902. That year he had published The Path To Rome, an account of his walking pilgrimage from France to Rome which has stayed in print. He often wrote in collaboration with G K Chesterton. He was a strong Catholic and an opponent of evolution.. He had no steady employment and was often short of money.
Hilaire opposed the parts of the 1906 Education Bill that related to Catholics and correctly predicted that The Catholic vote would transfer to the Labour party in due course. He criticised the government over the Chinese coolie compromise and made no secret of his contempt for militant temperance cmpaigners. He opposed female suffrage in a rather flippant way saying women were above parliamentary politics which infuriated both sides.
In 1907, Hilaire's most popular book Cautionary Tales for Children was published, a satire on Victorian moral primers.
Hilaire was a doctrinaire opponent of state intervention. He described Lloyd George's Budget speech in 1909 as the worst of all time.
Hilaire held the seat by 316 votes in January 1910 and lost it by exactly the same margin in December. He did not stand for Parliament again. He was angry that Asquith did not abolish the Lords altogether.
In 1912 Hilaire's The Servile State was published which criticised both capitalism and socialism and called for a return to pre-Reformation economics or paleo-corporatism. He favoured distributism, dispersing property, particularly land, in small amounts to the many, a return to the early ideas of Chamberlain and Collings
From 1914 to 1920 Hilaire was editor of Land and Water, a war journal.
In the 1920s he pursued literary feuds against H,G. Wells and G Coulton. He was a prolific writer on many subjects. He wrote a long series of contentious biographies of historical figures with the aim of showing the perils of departure from orthodox Catholicism.
Hilaire had some prescient words about Islam in his 1937 book, The Crusades : The World's Debate ;
"There is no reason why its recent inferiority in mechanical construction, whether military or civilian, should continue indefinitely. Even a slight accession of material power would make the further control of Islam by an alien culture difficult. A little more and there will cease that which our time has taken for granted, the physical domination of Islam by the disintegrated Christendom we know".
Hilaire was also noted for ant-semitic views on Jewish finance. He was a strong critic of Rufus Isaacs over the Marconi affair , using his journal Eye Witness to keep the affair in the public eye and in 1922 his book The Jews described their presence in Christian society as "a permanent problem of the gravest character". However Hilaire did condemn the Nazi brand of anti-semitism in his 1940 book The Catholic and the War.
Hilaire was also a keen yachtsman.
He died in 1953 aged 82.
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