Novel: The Revolt of the Angels

Overview
Anatole France’s 1914 novel The Revolt of the Angels is a sly, erudite satire that reimagines the Christian cosmos through a Gnostic lens while anatomizing Belle Époque Paris. It begins in the hushed library of the pious d’Esparvieu household, where books on theology and antiquity vanish mysteriously. The culprit is not a thief but an angel who has taken to reading. From that mischievous premise France unfolds a narrative in which celestial beings descend into human affairs, learn skepticism from the very texts meant to sustain faith, and brood over a second rebellion against Heaven. The tone is urbane and ironical; miracles and metaphysics are handled with the same dry wit as dinner parties, police reports, and drawing-room flirtations.

Plot
Maurice d’Esparvieu, a well-bred Parisian, discovers that his guardian angel, Arcade, has been secretly haunting his father’s library. In the company of the beleaguered librarian Sariette, who fears madness as volumes rearrange themselves in defiance of his catalog, Maurice confronts a revelation: reading has made Arcade lucid and disenchanted. He renounces his charge and, assuming human habits, wanders through Paris to experience freedom, pleasure, and thought. Maurice’s infatuation with the elegant Madame des Aubels turns into a comically bitter rivalry when the angel proves a more graceful lover than the young man he was meant to protect.

Arcade’s crisis shades into a larger conspiracy when he encounters other angels who have reached similar conclusions. Through the testimony of Nectaire, an old musician who quietly remembers the first war in Heaven, the novel recasts the creator God as Ialdabaoth, a powerful but ignorant Demiurge who fashioned the material world and demands worship. Lucifer, the bearer of light, appears less as the embodiment of evil than as the spirit of intelligence and revolt. In smoky back rooms and gardens the angels debate strategy, flirt with the idea of modern weaponry and political agitation, and dream of a decisive assault that would dethrone Ialdabaoth and establish a new order guided by reason.

The Uprising That Falters
France drapes this high design in comic mishaps and worldly temptations. The clergy bluster; the police pursue phantoms; Sariette clings to his catalog while his books continue their uncanny peregrinations. The angels themselves, tasting wine and love and conversation, are less martial than they hoped. At the crucial moment, Nectaire’s grave wisdom prevails. Overthrowing a tyrant to seize his place, he argues, merely repeats the tyranny; true revolt consists in refusing domination altogether, cultivating knowledge, pity, and freedom of mind. The conspiracy dissolves into a decision not to seize power but to live intelligently under imperfect conditions. The fallen remain among men, no longer eager to storm Heaven but resolved to practice a quiet, lucid disobedience. In a final twist of irony, the d’Esparvieu library is restored by a capricious miracle as inexplicable as the thefts that wrecked it, leaving Sariette triumphant and none the wiser.

Themes and Style
The novel is at once blasphemous and tender, replacing theological certainty with skeptical humanism. By identifying God with the Demiurge Ialdabaoth and ennobling Lucifer as intellect, France inverts orthodoxy to expose the appetites for power that animate both church and state. Angels behave like people; people reveal angelic or bestial streaks by turns; institutions appear pompous, brittle, and absurd. Beneath the urbanity runs a serious ethic: a politics of inward liberty over conquest, of inquiry over dogma, of pleasure tempered by sympathy. France’s prose moves easily from myth to boulevard, from patristic lore to bedroom comedy, its learning worn lightly and its irreverence aimed less at faith than at the arrogance that claims to speak for it. The Revolt of the Angels leaves the heavens unstormed and the reader with a subtler insurrection: an invitation to think freely and to refuse the seductions of authority.