In the wake of 9/11, politicians offered reassurance, firefighters became heroes, and newscasters pulled on-air marathons. The rest of us simply tried to grasp what had happened and imagine what might follow. Enter Nostradamus. Within hours, rumors circulated that he had predicted it all. One widely distributed e-mail contained a prophetic text that spoke of a city burning, a third big war beginning while a great leader succumbed, and two brothers torn apart by chaos. Another evoked a great king of terror and disaster during the year of the new century and nine months. “The sky will burn at forty-five degrees and fire shall engulf the world.” September was of course the ninth month of the year and New York City’s latitude is forty-one degrees. The message was clear: Nostradamus had foretold the attacks and warned the United States.
By September 12, these e-mails had spread across the country. One hundred of 120 students in one southern California high school received at least one. Several talk shows mentioned Nostradamus and propelled his name to the top of search engines, ahead of Osama bin Laden. Snopes.com debunked these messages as hoaxes, which was true only to a point. A Canadian student had written the prediction about two brothers, but the references to the great king of terror and the burning sky came from actual Nostradamian quatrains. Another email began circulating with the following words: “Fire at the earth’s core / Shall set the New City all quake.” People debated whether the great leader was George W. Bush and whether New York was indeed the big city in flames. On Brooklyn stoops, teenagers waved the quatrains while telling passers-by that “this guy, Nostradamus” had seen it coming.1
Within four days, Nostradamus’s Prophecies had jumped to the top of Amazon’s best sellers list. Five other books about him cracked the top twenty-five. “It’s one of those morbid business realities that in times like this people turn to relevant products,” explained a company spokeswoman. In one Barnes & Noble store in Brooklyn, twenty customers asked for Nostradamus in a single day. Joanna Jusino, a thirty-two-year-old New Yorker, told a journalist that she had ordered the Prophecies to know what to expect in the weeks to come. Booksellers restocked as fast as they could. The same happened in Hungary, where the Prophecies became a number-one best seller. In England, the Times remarked that Nostradamus was becoming more popular than books on sex. In Singapore, too, people pondered a prediction that seemed to have portrayed the attacks with such accuracy. “We were even discussing how it could be a sign that it was the end of the world,” explained one media executive. This was no fringe movement. In the midst of global distress, Nostradamus infiltrated mainstream culture.2
I could not help but watch in awe. My wife and I lived a few blocks from the World Trade Center at the time, and we evacuated our apartment while the towers burned. Holed up in a hotel room with our sons during the weeks that followed, we nursed our anguish as best we could while time itself grew still and furious. Like others, we participated in candlelight vigils and took in the impromptu memorials at Union Square. Nostradamus was something else: a mysterious lure, an emotional pull that drew so many people to scintillating words that came from another era and yet had never seemed more relevant. I did not consult Nostradamus that September, but I remembered that these predictions had entered my life once before. It happened in Brussels, where I grew up, during the early 1980s. I was fifteen or sixteen, and every magazine seemed to contain an article on his predictions and Soviet missiles flattening Western Europe. “Maximum Danger: Summer 1984!” blared the French weekly Paris-Match. Strong stuff. I was petrified and mesmerized and did not know what to make of this. But I kept on reading—without telling anyone.
When the quatrains resurfaced after 9/11, I could thus recall their force. Mostly, I was struck by their prevalence in our own times. Others paid attention as well. Norm Magnusson, a Manhattan-based artist, nailed a copy of the Prophecies to a twelve-foot-high wood beam and called the piece The Feeling We’re Entering an Era of Prophecies. It was part of a series on America and the world after 9/11. This sculpture expressed one take on the matter—Nostradamus as talisman—but it did not limit itself to that. “These paroxysms of prescience usually leave me flat,” Magnusson wrote in his artist’s note, “but this time they resonated just a bit. Maybe we were entering a foretold era. I didn’t believe it, but this time, I didn’t just write it off.”3
I did not write it off either, although like so many people I could barely associate a face with the name. There is a wonderful scene in the first Sopranos episode to air after 9/11 in which mafiosos Tony Soprano and Bobby Bacala catch up over dinner. At one point, Bobby remarks that Quasimodo had predicted the attacks. Tony looks up and replies that he is confusing Nostradamus with the fictional hunchback of Notre-Dame. “Oh, right, Notre Damus,” says Bobby—at which point Tony interjects that Notre-Dame and Nostradamus are altogether different. Bobby is puzzled and Tony knows little more. Neither do we. All of us have heard of Nostradamus; a few among us are aware that he lived a long time ago. But that is pretty much it. If asked what Nostradamus brings to mind, we might speak of “tabloids, crazy people on the street, and other rather strange phenomena in our culture.” This is one of the answers I received after posing the question to a class of college students not long ago.4
Nostradamus does draw us into a strange universe, full of ghosts, eerie prophets, and ominous forecasts. The strangest thing of all, however, is that Nostradamus and his predictions have become an enduring facet of the modern West. (Modern refers to the era that came into being during the Renaissance. Historians further distinguish between early and late modern periods, with the French Revolution as the dividing line.) It is rare for a book to speak to successive generations about their world, across national borders, languages, and cultural or political divides. The Bible has had such an afterlife, even if many religions dismiss it entirely. The plays of Shakespeare have had one as well. And so have Nostradamus’s Prophecies, a remarkable feat for a work that was written in Old French and obtained little religious or literary recognition in its time and afterward.
I was not drawn to Nostradamus by the prospect of determining whether the quatrains had really rested on extrasensory experience or precognitive information. I would not be the one to determine whether the “fire at the earth’s core” truly referred to the burning towers. Instead, I wanted to know where these predictions came from and how they had made it this far. I wanted to understand why they have mattered and continue to matter to all kinds of people. I wanted to recover the humanity and the multiple facets of a phenomenon that has become so diffuse and received such scorn that only a caricature remains. And I wanted to figure out what all of this says about the society that hosts Nostradamus. So it all began.
* * *
One of the joys of writing about such a topic is that people love to talk about it. Over the years, I have heard countless stories. A Puerto Rican student spoke about her grandmother, a devout Catholic who was obsessed with these predictions. A San Antonio retiree confessed that she once rescheduled a trip to California because Nostradamus had predicted an earthquake. A Los Angeles librarian told me that she cherished her aunt’s dog-eared copy of the Prophecies. And numerous residents of Salon-de-Provence, the town that the seer made his own, sat down for interviews about Nostradamus’s presence (or absence) there. I am indebted to all of them, and to numerous other people, for trusting me with their tales and recollections.
Others have listened to my ideas and voiced their own as well. Students in my course Apocalypse Now? The Lure of Nostradamus asked probing questions that took us into new directions. Special thanks to Anastasia Belinskaya, Marion Cohn, Dean Linnard, Amanda Mayo, Antonio Urias, and Xiaoying Zhang. Many friends and colleagues have provided suggestions, references, and rich conversation. It is a pleasure to thank Charles Affron, Olivier Berthe, Vicki Caron, Arnaud Coulombel, Steven Englund, Aude Fauvel, my mother Francine Gerson and my late father Bernie Gerson, Josh Gilbert, Denis Hollier, Tony Judt, Dominique Kalifa, Brigitte Lane, Bettina Lerner, Chantal Liaroutzos, Tod Lippy, Judith Lyon-Caen, Norm Magnusson, Dominique Martin, Gordon Neavill, Jacques Revel, Emmanuelle Saada, Maurice Samuels, Steven Sawyer, John Siciliano, David K. Smith, Marie-Eve Thérenty, and Laura van Straaten. I am also grateful for the opportunities to present this work at Columbia University, Cornell University, the Institute of French Studies (NYU), the Nineteenth-Century French Studies Conference, the Remarque Institute (NYU), the Society for French Historical Studies, the Sorbonne, SUNY Albany, Tufts University, and Yale University.
A book of this scope necessarily builds on the work of others. While I acknowledge my debts in the notes, I wish to make special mention of the scholars of the Renaissance and early modern era who have contributed so much to our understanding of Nostradamus and his words: Robert Benazra, Pierre Brind’Amour, Anna Carlstedt, Bernard Chevignard, Denis Crouzet, Hervé Drévillon, Claude-Gilbert Dubois, Patrice Guinard, Edgar Leroy, and Bruno Petey-Girard. Michel Chomarat took me on a memorable walking tour of Nostradamus’s Lyon and granted me full access to his remarkable collection on the man and his afterlife. The second leading Nostradamian collector of modern times, Daniel Ruzo de los Heros, died years ago, but his heirs auctioned off much of his library in 2007. I am grateful to Tobias Abeloff, Early Printed Books specialist at the Swann Auction Galleries in New York, for allowing me to consult these precious items, some of which had been presumed lost forever.
My research was supported in part by grants from the American Historical Association, the American Philosophical Society, the NYU Research Challenge Fund Program, and the Remarque Institute. It was made considerably easier by the help provided by librarians and archivists in countless institutions. I am beholden to Jean-Paul Laroche (Bibliothèque municipale de Lyon), Françoise Pelé and Guy Bonvicini (Archives municipales de Salon-de-Provence), Jacqueline Allemand (Maison Nostradamus), and Barbara Hall (Margaret Herrick Library). In France, I also wish to thank the staffs of the Archives départementales des Bouches-du-Rhône, the Archives Nationales, the Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal, the Bibliothèque Mazarine, the Bibliothèque Méjanes, the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, the Chambre de Commerce et d’Industrie Marseille Provence, the Institut Catholique de Paris, and the Institut de France. Elsewhere, thank you to the staff of the British Library, the libraries of Columbia, Cornell, and Harvard universities, the Houghton Library, the Huntington Library, the Newberry Library, the New York Public Library, and NYU’s interlibrary loan office. Ned Comstock (USC Cinematic Arts Library), Frédéric Maguet (Musée des Civilisations de l’Europe et de la Méditerranée), Emilienne Molina (Bibliothèque municipale d’Avignon), and Pascale Vignaud (Bibliothèque municipale de La Rochelle) kindly sent me copies of documents and images.
Françoise Wyss-Mercier shared documents and photographs from her personal collection on Salon-de-Provence’s historical pageants. Patricia Jeanbaptiste forwarded a copy of her master’s thesis. My colleague John Hamilton, my student Lisa Kitagawa, and my brother-in-law Tiziano Recchi provided translations of Latin, Japanese, and Italian sources. Steven Crumb and Joshua Jordan translated some French documents. Four fine research assistants—Suzanna Denison, Kari Evanson, Mary-Elizabeth O’Neill, and Rachel Wimpee—helped locate and transcribe sources; Grace Stephenson assisted with the bibliography. Heartfelt thanks to all of them—and to Esopus magazine for allowing me to reprint excerpts from my “Searching for Nostradamus: Tracking the Man, the Legend, and the Name Across Five Centuries.”
Several friends and colleagues have devoted considerable time and attention to this project. Dan Ain, James Smith Allen, Herrick Chapman, Mitch Horowitz, Suzanne A. Kaufman, and Anne-Marie Thiesse read parts of the book and provided helpful feedback. I am deeply indebted to four scholars who were generous enough to comment on the entire manuscript. Richard Sieburth provided a stimulating response to an early draft. Steven Crumb and Frédéric Viguier pushed me to clarify certain claims and draw new connections. Paul Cohen did the same, and also drew from his encyclopedic knowledge to help me broaden my scope. I am also grateful to Julia Serebrinsky for her sensitive input on the epilogue. While all of them have made this a better book, its shortcomings are mine alone. Tim Bent, Daniel Goldberg, Jon Karp, Cindy Karter, and Paul Katz gave vital advice regarding trade publishing. The path from manuscript to publication would have been much rockier without the steady hands and warm support of my agent Steve Hanselman. It has been a delight to work with Michael Flamini, Vicki Lame, and the entire team at St. Martin’s Press.
My deepest appreciations are at home. My son Julian has grown up with stories about Nostradamus and kept an eye out for relevant docudramas on late-night cable. He is a savvy conversationalist and an unusually sensitive person who accepted and perhaps even understood my fixation with these prophecies. It is difficult to express what my wife Alison has given me these past years. It goes far beyond the book, but when it came to this, she provided all of the encouragement and advice that I needed. She was willing to discuss facets of this story even when there were more urgent things to contemplate. She also gave the manuscript an astute read, capped by a memorable edit session in Arizona. Alison is a force and a wonder, and I am incredibly lucky to have her in my life.