Recommendations
Books Like La Révolte des anges
Best books to read after La Révolte des anges by Anatole France
If the theological comedy and circular pessimism of The Revolt of the Angels stayed with you — angels who find that defeating God would make them God — these eight works share its territory: the satirical treatment of religious institutions, the analysis of revolutionary movements that replicate what they overthrow, and the ironic treatment of idealism.
- 1Buy
L'Île des pingouins
by Anatole France
France's own most direct companion: the same circular argument applied to political and human history rather than theology — the civilization that destroys itself and begins again with the same founding accident.
- 2Buy
Les Dieux ont soif
by Anatole France
The revolutionary novel that La Révolte des anges concludes theologically: the same mechanism of idealism becoming tyranny, here dramatized in historical France in 1793-94 rather than in a metaphysical rebellion against heaven.
- 3Buy
The Master and Margarita
by Mikhail Bulgakov
The most important parallel in world literature: the Devil visiting Moscow, exposing human hypocrisy with the same ironic distance France deploys in La Révolte des anges, and including the same sympathy for the rebel against God (here Woland/Satan as the most interesting character).
- 4Buy
Paradise Lost
by John Milton
The great predecessor of the fallen-angel narrative tradition: France's La Révolte des anges inverts Milton's moral (the rebel is sympathetic, the defeat would be just) but uses the same subject and some of the same grandeur.
- 5Buy
Candide
by Voltaire
The essential eighteenth-century predecessor of France's ironic theological method: a systematic demonstration that the divine arrangement of the world cannot be reconciled with the evidence of human experience.
- 6Buy
The Grand Inquisitor
by Fyodor Dostoevsky
The chapter from The Brothers Karamazov in which the Inquisitor challenges the returned Christ is the most concentrated statement in fiction of the argument France takes on in La Révolte des anges: what the institutions built in God's name have become, and what a God who returned would find.
- 7Buy
Melmoth the Wanderer
by Charles Maturin
The Gothic predecessor of the rebellious-figure-against-God tradition, whose Faustian protagonist has sold his soul and wanders the earth seeking release — the same forbidden knowledge that drives the angels of France's novel to their rebellion.
- 8Buy
Thus Spoke Zarathustra
by Friedrich Nietzsche
Nietzsche's philosophical prose-poem about the death of God and the creation of new values is the philosophical context for France's theological comedy — the angels who reject God are acting out the Nietzschean program, and France's ironic conclusion is a comment on what that program would actually produce.
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