He had a decisive influence on writers such as Auguste Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, Henry James, Léon Bloy, Marcel Proust and Carmelo Bene.

As a young man, he was a liberal and an atheist,[1] and his early writings present religion as something that meddles in human affairs only to complicate and pervert matters.

Jules Lemaître, a less sympathetic critic, thought the extraordinary crimes of his heroes and heroines, his reactionary opinions, his dandyism and snobbery were a caricature of Byronism.

Barbey d'Aurevilly held strong Catholic opinions,[5][6] yet wrote about risqué subjects, a contradiction apparently more disturbing to the English than to the French themselves.

Barbey d'Aurevilly was also known for having constructed his own persona as a dandy, adopting an aristocratic style and hinting at a mysterious past, though his parentage was provincial bourgeois nobility, and his youth comparatively uneventful.