In a pious Paris household guardian of a great library, a poltergeist is scattering the most dangerous books in the collection. The culprit is no demon but young Maurice d’Esparvieu’s own guardian angel, Arcade, who has been reading science and philosophy — and the more he reads, the less he believes. Arcade discovers that the God he has served is not the maker of the universe but a jealous, ignorant demiurge, Ialdabaoth, and that the true friend of knowledge and light is the spirit men learned to fear as Satan. Materialising in the flesh, falling in love, and tumbling into bohemian Paris, Arcade sets out to recruit the other guardian angels of the city — who have been living incognito among us, many of them quietly faithless. Together this ragged fellowship of fallen spirits plots a second rebellion: to raise an army, storm the celestial throne, and cast down the tyrant at last. But the revolt needs its old leader, and so they summon the great archangel of the first war in Heaven himself. Told in Anatole France’s cool, ironic, endlessly civilised voice, The Revolt of the Angels is at once a delicious comedy of angels adrift in the modern world, a sharp anticlerical satire on dogma and authority, and a profound meditation on revolt. For when Satan at last imagines his victory complete, he sees what conquest has made of him and refuses the throne — “God, conquered, will become Satan; Satan, conquering, will become God” — and concludes that the only tyrant worth destroying is the one within. Voltairean in its wit and Miltonic in its theme, this is the crowning satire of the writer who won the 1921 Nobel Prize. This edition presents the complete public-domain English translation with an editor’s foreword on the book’s satire, technique, and the great reversal at its close, a biographical note, a guide to further reading, and questions for reflection.
