He was the second of six sons of Jean-Baptiste Bloy, a Voltairean freethinker , and Anne-Marie Carreau, a stern disciplinarian and pious Spanish-Catholic daughter of a Napoleonic soldier.
In December , he met the aging Catholic author Barbey d'Aurevilly , who lived opposite him in rue Rousselet and who became his mentor.
Shortly afterwards, he underwent a dramatic religious conversion. For example, in , after the death of Victor Hugo , whom Bloy believed to be an atheist , Bloy decried Hugo's "senility," "avarice," and "hypocrisy," identifying Hugo among "contemplatives of biological scum. In addition to his published works, he left a large body of correspondence with public and literary figures.
He died on 3 November in Bourg-la-Reine. Bloy was noted for personal attacks, but he saw them as the mercy or indignation of God. According to Jacques Maritain , he used to say: "My anger is the effervescence of my pity. Among the many targets of Bloy's attacks were people of business. In an essay in Pilgrim of the Absolute , he compared the businessmen of Chicago unfavourably to the cultured people of Paris:.
Bloy is quoted in the epigraph at the beginning of Graham Greene 's novel The End of the Affair , though Greene claimed that "this irate man lacked creative instinct" in reference to Bloy.
