With L’Ange de la Révolte, the Musée Thomas Henry in Cherbourg-en-Cotentin turns its attention to a figure that profoundly shaped the nineteenth century. Here, Satan emerges as a reflection of modernity, desire and unease. Long regarded primarily as a religious presence, he evolved in fin-de-siècle art and literature into an ambiguous figure, at once seductive, melancholic and rebellious.

Against the backdrop of a changing Europe, the fallen angel appears no longer solely as a monstrous antagonist, but as a symbol of individual freedom and resistance to established order. Works by Eugène Delacroix, Alexandre Cabanel, Félicien Rops and James Ensor reveal how artists used the figure of Satan and the imagery of the demonic to give form to the tensions and desires of their time.