Apple Books, Kobo, Google Play — and Kindle via Send to Kindle
- ✓ Choose your format — EPUB, PDF, or Kindle
- ✓ Instant download after purchase
- ✓ Yours to keep — no subscription
From the Devil to God (Du Diable à Dieu)
1907 · translated from the French · 116 pages
From the Devil to God (Du Diable à Dieu)
by Adolphe Retté
The full French text is public domain and free to read — linked below. This English translation is ours.
On this page: a summary of From the Devil to God (Du Diable à Dieu), which translation this edition uses, and our clean edition as a PDF or EPUB.
“From the Devil to God” is the first-person conversion memoir of Adolphe Retté, a French Symbolist poet and anarchist who had been a militant atheist and materialist known for public blasphemy. After a crisis of despair and suicidal impulses, he converted to Catholicism in 1906, and here tells that story in his own words. This is the first English translation, made for this edition from the 1907 French text.
The changed life
Raised without faith and, by his own and his contemporaries’ account, a militant atheist active among anti-religious circles, Retté passed through despair and suicidal impulses to convert to Catholicism in 1906 — the most literal atheist-to-Christian journey among our conversion narratives.
Summary
Du Diable à Dieu (“From the Devil to God”), published in Paris in 1907 with a preface by François Coppée, is Adolphe Retté's first-person account of his conversion. Among first-person unbelief-to-faith narratives it is one of the most literal: Retté had been, by his own and his contemporaries’ account, a militant atheist and materialist, active in anti-religious circles and known for public blasphemy.
The book traces the crisis that broke that unbelief — a period of despair and suicidal impulses — and the movement of a hostile, worldly mind toward the Catholic faith he embraced in 1906. Written by a working poet of the French Symbolist movement, it carries the literary sensibility of its author into a candid record of spiritual struggle and surrender.
It should be read as a period document of a genuine, hard-won conversion, told from the inside by a man who had spent his adult life attacking the very faith he came to profess.
Who was Adolphe Retté?
Adolphe Retté (1863–1930) was a French Symbolist poet and anarchist. Raised without religious faith, he became by his own and his contemporaries’ account a militant atheist and materialist, active among anti-religious circles and known for public blasphemy, before a spiritual crisis involving despair and suicidal impulses led him to convert to Catholicism in 1906.
Du Diable à Dieu was the first of several accounts he wrote of his new faith, followed by further volumes such as Sous l'Étoile du Matin and Au pays des lys noirs. Of all the conversion memoirs we offer, his is the most literal atheist-to-Christian story — a man who moved from open hostility to the church into its communion.
Which translation of From the Devil to God (Du Diable à Dieu) is this?
Ours is the only English edition there is: no public-domain English translation of Du Diable a Dieu existed, so we made one from the 1907 French text. It is a machine translation with editorial review rather than the work of a human translator, which is why it costs a fraction of a scholarly translation, and we link the free French source so anyone can check it against the original.
Common questions
- Is this book available in English?
- Yes — in our edition. Du Diable a Dieu was written in French and no public-domain English translation existed, so we made one from the 1907 text. It is a machine translation with editorial review, not a scholarly translation, and we say so plainly here, on the book page and in the book itself. The free French original is linked so you can check any passage against it.
- Who translated it?
- We did, for this edition. The translation was produced with a local machine-translation pipeline and then reviewed and corrected editorially. The 1907 French text is in the public domain; the English translation is copyright T.S. Baker Books.
- Was Retté genuinely an atheist before his conversion?
- Yes. By his own and his contemporaries’ account he was a militant atheist and materialist, active in anti-religious circles and known for public blasphemy, before converting to Catholicism in 1906 — making his the most literal atheist-to-Christian memoir in our collection.
A note on the text. The French text of From the Devil to God (Du Diable à Dieu) is in the public domain. This English translation is not — it is ours. It was made by machine translation with editorial review, not by a human translator working from scratch. We say so because it is the honest description of what it is, and because it is why this edition costs a fraction of a scholarly translation rather than competing with one. The original text is also available free here.
That free scan shows at least 0.1 errors per 1,000 characters (OCR mistakes, stray marks, broken words). Our edition corrects them.
Related reading
The same Paris
En Route
J.-K. Huysmans · 1895
Huysmans’s autobiographical novel of the identical passage out of French decadence, and the best account anywhere of what the process feels like from inside.
On the same shelf
Transformed; or, The History of a River Thief
Jerry McAuley · 1876
Also listed in Christian Conversion Stories.
On the same shelf
Baba Padmanji: An Autobiography
Baba Padmanji · 1892
Also listed in Christian Conversion Stories.
More like this
We publish first-person accounts of changed lives, and translate works into English that have never been in it. Pick what you want to hear about — nothing is pre-selected, and every email carries a one-click unsubscribe.