La Révolte des anges Reading Order

La Révolte des anges (The Revolt of the Angels, 1914) is Anatole France's last major novel, a theological comedy about the angels who rebel against God and find, when they finally defeat him in heaven, that the victor will simply become the new God — just as the revolutionaries who overthrow one tyranny inevitably establish another. The novel begins in contemporary Paris: Arcade, the guardian angel of a young Parisian nobleman, loses his faith in God after reading the books in his ward's library and organizes a revolt among the fallen angels who have been living on earth disguised as humans. The novel is structured as a satire of revolutionary ideology in its theological form: the same mechanism that France analyzed in the French Revolution (in Les Dieux ont soif) and in French political history (in L'Île des pingouins) appears in its ultimate metaphysical form — the revolt against God as a model for all revolutionary movements that repeat the structure of what they overthrow. The final dream-vision, in which Satan defeats God and is shown by a wise man what his victory will produce (a New Heaven exactly like the old one, a New Satan exactly like the old God), is the most concentrated statement in France's fiction of his historical pessimism about the revolutionary impulse.