Léon Bloy's undoubted eccentricity is of more than individual significance; his vituperative prose, whether fictional or nonfictional, merits consideration as more than a series of admittedly bizarre curiosities. The singularly uncharitable Christian polemic that constitutes the major part of his writing (and like those of all true sectarians, Bloy's attacks on others of his own faith are even more violent than those on atheists) is a significant element in the literary history of the grands exaspérés. This tendency, whose opposition to the dominant positivist rationality of the late nineteenth century had its literary origins in both the frenetic Catholic apologetics of Louis Veuillot and the quasi-nihilist irony of Gustave Flaubert's later works, was to be characterized principally in the writing of Bloy--and later that of Charles Péguy and Louis Céline--by a political ideology of extreme reaction (in varying...