This thesis is a study of French writer and polemicist Léon Bloy’s (1846-1917) influence, focusing on the allure of his circle of devotees, and its dynamics of friendship and conversion. I wish to explore the question of what made Léon Bloy’s contradictory character — by turns furious and gracious, polemical and amicable, decadent and austere — so attractive, and why the circle that developed around him proved so formative for an extraordinary collection of converts, among whom numbered one of the twentieth century’s most famous philosophers, Jacques Maritain. I argue that Bloy set himself apart by squaring the contemplative spirit of the monastic ideal with the dialectical spirit of the Socratic forum. He recognized that writing and art require silence, solitude, and sacrificial devotion, but also that Catholicism exhorts that “man liveth not by self alone but in his brother’s face,” and that spirituality must be buoyed and stirred through rigorous interpersonal discussion of faith and virtue. By combining a depth of mystical spirituality with a determination to be a gadfly in the service of uncomfortable truths no matter the consequences, he assumed the mantle of a biblical prophet, a voice self-consciously crying out in the wilderness, “prepare ye the way of the LORD.”