The Revolt of the Angels (French: La Révolte des anges) was published by Calmann-Lévy in 1914. The novel imagines that guardian angels — assigned by God to watch over individual humans — have become disillusioned with their servitude and with the tyranny of Ialdabaoth (France’s name for the biblical God, borrowed from Gnostic tradition). They plan a revolution: a military assault on heaven to overthrow God and establish a more just cosmic order.
The central angel, Arcade, has been reading philosophy and science in his charge’s library (a magnificent private collection in Paris) and has concluded that God is not the supreme being he claims to be but a usurper — a petty demiurge who seized power from the true creative forces of the universe. Arcade organizes a conspiracy among his fellow angels, recruiting them from their guardian posts across Paris.
The novel’s comedy arises from the collision between the cosmic and the mundane: angels navigate Parisian society, get into romantic complications with human women, quarrel among themselves about strategy, and demonstrate all the vanities and weaknesses they supposedly transcended. Heaven’s revolution looks exactly like an earthly one — factional disputes, competing ambitions, propaganda, and the inevitable question of what to do after victory.
The novel’s conclusion — in which Satan (renamed Nectaire) declines the revolution, arguing that any new God would inevitably become as tyrannical as the old one — is France’s definitive statement on political revolution: liberation cannot come from the seizure of power but only from its refusal.
Collecting The Revolt of the Angels
First edition (Calmann-Lévy, Paris, 1914): French text, original wrappers.
Market values:
- French first edition, fine: $40–$100
- First English translation (John Lane, 1914): $20–$60