From the Devil to God (Du Diable à Dieu)

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.

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.

This is a new English translation of Du diable à Dieu: histoire d'une conversion ("From the Devil to God: The Story of a Conversion") by Adolphe Retté, first published in Paris in 1907 with a preface by François Coppée. The French text is in the public domain. To our knowledge, the book has never before been translated into English: this edition is the first English translation.

The translation was produced by T.S. Baker Books using machine translation, checked section by section against the French, with flagged passages retranslated and reviewed editorially. We have aimed at a faithful, readable rendering of Retté's prose — a Symbolist poet's prose, full of deliberate imagery, which we have kept rather than smoothed away — not a paraphrase. The part and chapter divisions are the author's own.

Retté quotes Latin constantly, and we have left it as he set it. The Office that opens each of the three Parts, the verses of the Vulgate in his footnotes, the Angelus he overhears in the forest of Fontainebleau, and the lines he takes from Ovid, Horace and Saint Bernard all appear here in Latin, as they appear in the French. Several of these passages only work because the words are Latin: the reader is meant to stand where Retté stood, catching a sentence he half understands. Where he gives no French rendering of his own, we give none either. The names of prayers are the exception — his le Pater and l'Ave are the Our Father and the Hail Mary, and we say so.

Retté was an anti-Semite, and this edition does not hide it. He calls the collectivists "less Jewified than the anarchists," he reads and approves Édouard Drumont, and the reader will meet both. An earlier draft of this translation softened the first of those into a paraphrase, and we have put it back. Our reason is simple: a translation that quietly launders an author's prejudice leaves the reader unable to see what he was, and the change is made where nobody can check it. We would rather print what he wrote and say here what we think of it. He is a man describing his own conversion out of hatred, and he did not get all the way out.

This is the third version of this edition, issued in August 2026. The second version The first, published in July, was found on review to have translated Retté's Latin into English, to have dropped three of his footnotes, and — through a fault in our own text-preparation — to have omitted chapter XIV, the book's closing chapter, altogether. All three were corrected in the second. The third version comes from reading all 121 sections of the French against all 121 sections of the English, one beside the other. That turned up about ninety-five further faults, and two kinds of them matter to a reader. Some inverted the sense: Retté says Anatole France had thoroughly deserved his humiliation and the English said he did not deserve it; "le père Hugo" is Victor Hugo himself and the English invented a father for him; the author's own surname was translated into a common noun. Others got a thing wrong: elms became oaks, hornbeams became ashes, bullfinches became blackbirds, a chair-maker became a cooper, and the wife of a lawyer became a lawyer. All are corrected.

Worse, and found at the same time: Retté quotes six passages of verse — two of Baudelaire's and three poems of his own — and every one was missing, because our text-preparation read only the prose paragraphs of the source and the poems are set as verse. The prose was left with colons leading nowhere. All forty-seven lines are restored here, in English, line for line and unrhymed: Retté's are rhymed alexandrines and Baudelaire's are Baudelaire, and a rhyming English would have bought music with accuracy.

We record all of this because a reader who bought an earlier version deserves to know what changed, and because we would rather say what went wrong than quietly replace a file.

The original French text is freely available at the source linked on this book's page, and we encourage any reader who wants the author's exact words to consult it. If you find an error in the translation, we would be glad to hear of it and correct it.