Unfortunately for his luck and fortunately for the art of rhetoric, Bloy became a specialist in injury.

Jorge Luis Borges

Léon Bloy (1846-1917), an uncomfortable polemicist, has been characterized by Antoine Compagnon as the last of the anti-modern writers. This literary trend appeared at the end of the 19th century and continued into the 20th, and can be considered as one of the voices of malaise of the French fin de siècle which, together with others such as symbolists and decadentists, made up the motley artistic scene of the time. . The antimoderns are defined by their criticism of progressive ideology and technological changes that they consider negative, contrasting with the majority, in many cases these writers are Catholic and monarchical, although innovative in their art. Léon Bloy, whose youth was an atheist and sympathetic to the Commune, entered this world at the hands of the frenzied writer Barbey d'Aurevilly who introduced him to the works of counterrevolutionaries such as Joseph de Maistre. He shared his vision of the world with the symbolists Joris-Karl Huysmans and Auguste de Villiers de L'Isle-Adam, but his exacerbated criticism alienated him from his friends and the literary world, being the object of total ostracism. However, his work has fascinated many writers, some close to his ideas such as Georges Bernanos or Ernst Jünger, but others far removed such as Franz Kafka, Jorge Luis Borges, Alfred Jarry or Roland Barthes.

In In the dark (1917) Léon Bloy reflects on the enigmas of humanity. Against the backdrop of World War I –for him punishment and announcement of the end– and the metaphor of blindness, he analyzes and harasses a world that is collapsing.