Chapter 9

We Are Not Nostradamites!

“Can a serious person believe in prophecies?”

La Phalange, a French periodical, posed this question to its readers in 1841. It would not have asked if prophecies and supernatural forces did not seem ubiquitous at that time. In the countryside, rural prophets announced the fall of the monarchy or the advent of an Oriental prince. In cities, fortune-tellers, crystal gazers, cartomancers, and palm readers opened shop and answered questions about legal prospects, missing goods, and other pressing matters. Magnetic somnambulists staged public performances in hospitals and universities. This fervor coincided with a religious revival—Catholic in France, Methodist in England—that brought prophecy to the fore in pamphlets and newspapers. It also overlapped with Romantic visions and dreamscapes that connected the soul and the cosmos. “Below what appears to be logical,” one French daily observed, lies “a mysterious, horrendous, irrational world.”¹

All of this happened during an era that perceived itself as fundamentally different from the retrograde centuries that had preceded. France had entered an age of constitutional politics, office work, steam engines, and large-scale factories. The nation’s heroes were now inventors, writers, doctors, and scientists who could grasp the infinitesimally small and the staggeringly large facets of nature. Paris had likewise begun its transformation into the capital of the nineteenth century, a city of glass-roofed shopping arcades and grandiose salons, where public hygiene mattered as much as banking practices. Soothsayers and believers in supernatural forces did not go unnoticed in this self-consciously modern world. The irrational, declared one newspaper, persisted only because of the enduring frailty of the human mind. Other commentators accepted that the forward march of human civilization was circuitous rather than linear. The flames of imagination still flickered, but not for much longer.²

Some people, however, deemed themselves rational and yet could not resist the lure of the supernatural. Among them was a young journalist named Eugène Bareste, the subject of La Phalange’s article. Spend enough time in the Nostradamian underworld and you will inevitably run into Bareste. As the author of Nostradamus, a heavy tome published in 1840, and the main editorial force behind an annual Prophetic Almanac founded that same year, Bareste was the latest in the line of Nostradamian providers who kept the quatrains in the public eye. We could spend time with any number of them, from the mathematics teacher Théodore Bouys, who held that the clairvoyant Nostredame had announced a glorious future for Napoléon’s empire, to the Avignon bookseller Pierre Chaillot, who declared that his torch alone would blaze a path across the maze of the Prophecies. But none of them did more for the phenomenon in the nineteenth century than Bareste. Innumerable journalists and writers drew from his publications when writing about Nostradamus—in France, elsewhere in Europe, and as far away as Kirksville, Missouri, where a local newspaper translated sections of his almanacs.³

From our vantage point, embracing Nostradamus may seem like an odd choice for an enterprising man of letters. What reputable person would give credence to the gibberish of a seer who had resided in a crypt? The writer Auguste Villiers de L’Isle-Adam thus apologized to his friend Gustave Flaubert in 1864 for the plebeian literary tastes of his parents, which barely extended beyond Nostradamus. When a high school teacher from Normandy assigned his students an essay question on Nostradamus a few years later, they staged a mocking show in which the prophet, attired in the requisite robe and pointy hat, sang a ludicrous song about the moon. Such feelings were increasingly widespread.⁴

And yet Bareste was not alone. While many men and women shunned Nostradamus, plenty of respectable individuals and media outlets gravitated toward a phenomenon that they deemed meaningful, intriguing, or full of opportunities—and unseemly as well. If Bareste plays such an important role in this story, it is because he helped anchor Nostradamus in a media culture that remained its strongest base and would now reshape it for public consumption. He also captures the allure of these prophecies and magical thinking in modern times while displaying the ambivalence that accompanied this fascination in middle-class circles. Could moderns believe in prophecies? Could they live with the supernatural vapors, the plebeian passions, and the commercial excess that Nostradamus more than any other soothsayer now embodied? And could they come to terms with their own contradictory urges and feelings? La Phalange’s question escaped easy answers, but perhaps there was a way. Bareste certainly thought so.

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Eugène Bareste was born in Paris in 1814, during the twilight of Napoléon’s empire. Despite his modest background (his father was a locksmith), he resolved at a young age to write for a living. Such careers now beckoned in ways that they could not have in earlier centuries, when fewer people were literate, guilds controlled book production, publishers paid little, and intellectual property remained a hazy concept. Without benefactors, writers struggled. The French Revolution upended things by outlawing guilds, ending censorship, and enshrining the rights of authors in law. Publishers took advantage of this new climate and exploited new technologies to quadruple book production and diversify their offerings. The print market exploded, and the daily press took off as well. An American visitor remarked in 1838 that a Parisian breakfast now consisted of coffee, an omelet, and a newspaper. Another American explained that Parisians could no longer be described as a population of talkers. They had become a community of readers. Eager to boost sales and lure advertisers, newspaper editors began publishing commentaries, reviews, and travel accounts along with news reports. This demand for new material created unprecedented opportunities for journalists and writers.⁵

Bareste published his first book (about admirable workers) in 1834. He was twenty years old. During the years that followed, he contributed varied pieces to periodicals and for a while managed a newspaper in the Champagne region. He also headed an arts journal, reviewed art shows, and curated an exhibit at the Louvre. This cultural jack-of-all-trades made up in stamina what he lacked in expertise or superlative talent. In 1840, Bareste turned to Nostradamus. His book provided a comprehensive take on the man and his prophecies, with a biography, an essay on prophecy, and interpretations of selected quatrains that he organized around key historical events. Around the same time, Bareste launched the Prophetic, Picturesque, and Useful Almanac, a paperback-size publication with a thin yellow cover. Nostradamus surfaced in many articles as well as the full title: Published by the Author of “Nostradamus” or (after 1853) Published by a Nephew of Nostradamus. Nostradamus was both a source of material and a name that needed little introduction. The almanac took off at once and came out every year until 1895. “Most of the concierges have heard of Nostradamus,” an English magazine reported, “and it fills them with a species of awe to discover that the Prophetic Almanack is edited by a nephew of the famous sayer of prophecies.”⁶

It was not just concierges. While Nostredame had faded behind the prophets Mother Shipton and Nixon in Great Britain, his prophecies about Varennes and other episodes of the French Revolution retained such a deep hold on French minds that contemporaries equated them with the resurgence of divination. The French no longer believe in ghosts, an abbot declared in 1811, but now they believe in Nostradamus and horoscopes. The New York Commercial Advertiser agreed that all kinds of people had been parsing his predictions during the past twenty years. Many inquired about Napoléon Bonaparte, the modest Corsican who had risen through the ranks in the 1790s, achieved resounding victories, become consul, and then ruled France and parts of Europe as emperor until 1815. This saga was the first of several events that drew a new generation toward the quatrains. “Near Italy an Emperor shall be born / Who shall cost the empire a pretty pence”: these lines from quatrain 1.60 joined the ranks of his most-quoted predictions. So did another line that seemed to predict Napoléon’s ascent: “From simple soldier he shall race to power” (8.57). People turned to Nostradamus for confirmation of the emperor’s rise or fall and for insight into what lay ahead for the ruler and his country. In 1813, an imprisoned French soldier reportedly told the crown prince of Sweden that Nostradamus had predicted the emperor’s demise, the return of the Bourbons, their own downfall, and then mayhem. In Provence later that decade, a veteran of the Napoleonic Wars grew intrigued by an apocryphal Nostradamian quatrain about a small man and his tomb. Might this relate to the emperor’s death? The veteran could not be sure, so he wrote the quatrain on his mantelpiece and then added: “To check.” By that time, rumor had it that Napoléon himself had consulted Nostradamus.⁷

The veteran came across this quatrain in his village, when he saw a boy reading a flimsy chapbook filled with such prophecies. It may have been The French Prophet by Nostradamus, The Great and Double Nostradamus, or any of the countless low-cost publications that now revolved around the prophet. There were even regional titles such as the Nostradamus lillois, named after the city of Lille. The French market for popular print remained ultracompetitive, with innumerable serials, brochures, and engravings sold each year by peddlers, booksellers, and grocers. Publishers targeted a wide readership by reprinting old titles and adapting them to present times. The New and True Prognostications by Michel Nostradamus for Five Years, to name but one, provided apocryphal quatrains that, they claimed, came straight from the tomb. The main French purveyor of popular print, publisher Nicolas Pellerin, sold his edition of the Prophecies of Michel Nostradamus for a franc and a half, the same price as the Life of Jesus-Christ and Aesop’sFables. (Workers earned about two francs a day at this time.) In the Vosges, near the Swiss border, the Prophecies of Nostradamus had a fifteen-hundred-copy print run for the month of November 1853 alone. This put it among the top five in that region of France.⁸

Bareste was no doubt familiar with such publications, but he lived in a different world: a middlebrow realm that set itself apart from both popular and aristocratic cultures. Here, encyclopedias, newspapers, and magazines embraced reason, progress, and learning, and then packaged them as respectable entertainment for lawyers, doctors, and civil servants—along with shopkeepers, employees, and some nobles. Periodicals such as Charles Dickens’s Household Words and the Musée des familles—the New Yorkers andNewsweeks of the day—offered historical tales and geography lessons with dollops of current events and sprinklings of fiction. By the 1830s, some of them published articles about prophecy, divination, and Nostradamus.

Middlebrow culture included almanacs as well, though not the low-end ones sold by Pellerin. Publishers modernized an old genre by adding material found in the likes of Household Words. “Almanacs have undergone a complete transformation,” explained one French official. “They are now real books, full of scientific treatises, considerations on art trades, historical essays—with millions of copies sold.” In today’s marketing lingo, we might say that publishers were differentiating their product. It was now possible to buy astronomical, agronomical, theatrical, or comical almanacs. Some were aimed at sailors, others at ladies or gardeners. A journalist commented that these publications were entering every recess of society, from the porter’s nook and the smoke-filled garret to the mistress’s salon and the statesman’s office. Bareste’s Parisian publishers understood all this. On the Left Bank, Laurent-Antoine Pagnerre sold his almanacs in a small store whose windows were covered with placards. On the Right Bank, the Aubert bookshop stocked them in a brightly lit establishment that overflowed with prints and books of all sizes. To broaden their readership, both of them kept the price of the almanac low (fifty centimes). They also provided more than calendars and feast days, as their publication’s full title—Prophetic, Picturesque and Useful Almanac—made clear. The prophetic encompassed all kinds of articles on the future and the supernatural, from divination to numerological codes. The picturesque revolved around odd events, humorous tales, and strange anecdotes. The useful, finally, included practical advice and instructive articles on history or political economy. The cover page’s motto “Education, improvement, progress” said it all. This was not your grandfather’s almanac.⁹

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Bareste’s book and almanac came out during turbulent times in France. After seizing power, Napoléon had redrawn French legal codes, administrative frameworks, and religious institutions. The man who claimed to have made France a century older (and that much more stable) in four years also embroiled the country in endless wars that led to his downfall. The Bourbon dynasty returned from exile in 1815, governed the country for fifteen years, and then fell victim to a revolution that brought a liberal monarch named Louis-Philippe to power in 1830. The 1830s and 1840s were tense and polarized decades, filled with strikes, riots, plots, and attempts on the king’s life. Around 1840, the government responded to political and economic volatility by making a rightward, bellicose turn. Ministers promised to expand France’s natural boundaries to the Rhine and warned Great Britain about its ties to the Ottoman Empire. As new fortifications were built around Paris, war between France and England began to seem inevitable. TheProphetic Almanacdepicted a French society in agony, dragged down by paralyzed politicians, mediocre thinkers, and bankrupt businessmen. “If Europeans have grown so interested in prophecies these past years,” it explained in 1841, “it is because all social classes are suffering while awaiting a better future.”¹⁰

A magistrate from Aix went farther a few years later: “French society is in such turmoil; there is so much uncertainty … that our entire curiosity focuses upon the future and more precisely its secrets and mysteries.” All kinds of prophecies spoke of disasters, the monarchy’s overthrow, and even the end of the world around 1840. In the mid-1810s, the archangel Raphael had appeared before a peasant and announced two decades of calamities—until 1840. In the late 1830s, the so-called Orval prophecy (a forgery) garnered considerable attention in France. It featured an obscure monk who predicted the king’s fall and the advent of a Great Monarchy that would unite European powers while returning England to Catholicism. “Several old prophecies, particularly of Nostradamus, refer to the year 1840 as the season of wonderful events,” the English banker and dandy Thomas Raikes observed while visiting Paris. Close to twenty publications by or about Nostradamus came out within a few years. Quatrain 9.89 seemed to depict recent and future happenings:

This was the quatrain’s meaning: after seven years of prosperity, during which the monarchy would put down uprisings in colonial Algeria, the French king would fall to a rival politician, either a royalist or Napoléon’s nephew. Bareste contributed to this vatic enthusiasm by publishing articles on prophecy in 1839. He linked the number 40, long deemed momentous, to the year to come, and prefaced a prophetic collection that ranged from the monk of Orval to Philippe Dieudonné Noël Olivarius, an imagined sixteenth-century astrologer who had reportedly foreseen the advent of Napoléon. A year later, he turned to Nostradamus.¹¹

Bareste would not have done so with such energy if he did not seek to infuse elemental mysteries and magical thinking into an arid, skeptical, materialistic society. He was not alone. Another man of letters, Victor Fournel, evoked this widespread yearning: “Mystery is always alluring; obscurity with its visions, true or false, both fascinates and frightens us. We like the dizzying depths of the abyss and the revelations of the unknown.” The new century, Fournel added, relishes “the shudder of fear.” Such sentiments went back to Renaissance pamphlets and horrific plays, but contemporaries now felt chilling yet thrilling tremors while contemplating the immensity of nature, the mysteries of the world, and the fall of civilizations. This was the Romantic sublime: an intimate encounter with terrifyingly beautiful and unmasterable forces. Remote admiration and rational judgment faded behind awe and dread as one became aware of oneself as a tormented, mortal, but acutely sentient being. Prophecies that sprouted from a distant past and pointed toward an infinite future could generate such feelings. So it was with Nostradamus, whose scintillating beauty resided in evocative words, grandiose horizons, and morbid legends. An uncorrupted poetic vein shot up from an underground well deep within the core of civilization. Beyond folklore and the soft glow of nostalgia, Nostradamus’s primeval simplicity promised to revivify a sterile industrial age.¹²

Prophecy was not politically innocent, however. Radicals were drawn to a millennial platform that announced a new democratic era of brotherly love. Reactionaries, in contrast, sought to overcome the calamitous effects of the French Revolution by returning to a golden era in which the Church and the Bourbon monarchy governed France. Around 1840, a French prosecutor denounced a Book of Prophecies that displayed affection for the fallen Bourbons. Nostradamus could not escape such associations. The counterrevolutionary theorist Joseph de Maistre drew from his predictions to argue that the revolution had launched a sequence of events that would culminate with the restoration of the monarchy. A leading royalist newspaper did the same while condemning a corrupt and doomed liberal era. As Nostradamus continued its move to the political right, people on the left accused his followers of manipulating quatrains to announce catastrophic events. “They take on the mien of prophecy to gain ascendancy over the populace,” explained one critic. Some officials shared these concerns and forbade almanacs and pamphlets that bore Nostradamus’s name.¹³

Bareste, too, winked in the direction of the right and the Bourbon dynasty. He insisted that Nostradamus had predicted a bloodthirsty revolution followed by a disastrous half century. He also selected several quatrains that, in his view, announced the king’s demise. “By avarice, by force & violence / The chief of Orléans will come to vex his supporters” (quatrain 8.42). According to Bareste this chief was King Louis-Philippe, heir of the Orléans family. And yet Bareste’s politics fluctuated during these decades. Before pining for a pre-Enlightenment world, he had mourned the Napoleonic empire and embraced freedom of the press. When the Republican left returned to power in 1848, he defended free education and equal pay for women. Perhaps Bareste was politically cautious. Perhaps his convictions evolved over time. Or perhaps his professional disappointment morphed into animosity against the regime in power. However that may be, the Prophetic Almanac welcomed contributors from many political schools. It proved as varied in its politics as in its contents and readership.¹⁴

Beyond prophetic enthusiasm, beyond politics, Bareste expected that a public association with Nostradamus would bring personal rewards. He lived in the age of Chateaubriand and Victor Hugo, beacons who ignited literary ambitions in all corners of France. Thousands of young would-be writers sought glory, influence, and wealth in the capital. Honoré de Balzac devoted one of his best novels, Lost Illusions, to the tribulations of a provincial who moved to Paris in order to write and make something of himself. Bareste’s literary aspirations were not as defined. He published a novella and essays, but neither plays and poems (the conventional pathways to literary glory) nor novels (the new route). Still, he sought success within a universe in which smarts, ideas, and convictions rarely sufficed on their own. Like so many hopeful writers, Balzac’s protagonist failed to conquer Paris. Money and connections proved indispensable, and so did a fine understanding of the literary realm’s unwritten rules.¹⁵

Bareste was a small fish in the Parisian literary pond, a scribbler with sundry publications but scant recognition or success. He joined the new Society of Men of Letters, founded to defend the rights and interests of writers, because he saw himself as one of them. In fact, he signed letters “Eugène Bareste, man of letters.” In 1840, he published an annotated translation of Homer’s Odyssey, which his publisher advertised as faithful and elegant. He also planned a history of Homeric times that, he said, would appeal to historians, archaeologists, and ordinary readers. In the mid-1840s, he toured German universities on behalf of the French Ministry of Education. Bareste entertained serious ambitions; intellectual recognition mattered. But so did money. It was partly due to financial pressures that he hopped from one literary venture to another. He requested several loans from the Society of Men of Letters, promising to reimburse them as soon as his advances came in. “I absolutely need a reply today or tomorrow at the latest for I am completely penniless,” he once wrote the society’s secretary.¹⁶

In order to achieve his twin ambitions, Bareste sought something that could pay dividends while coming across as learned or useful. Like Jean-Aimé de Chavigny and so many others afterward, he settled on Nostradamus. His publisher Laurent-Antoine Pagnerre likewise balanced personal convictions and commercial imperatives. As a political radical, he released popular almanacs that would educate and politicize readers while entertaining them. Around 1850, visitors to his bookstore could find left-wing politicians such as Alphonse de Lamartine and Louis Blanc working on a back table. As a businessman, however, Pagnerre published all sorts of low- and middlebrow almanacs for the French and foreign markets, from the Picturesque Almanac to the Literary and Theatrical Almanac to the New Nostradamus. In the 1860s, he was still printing close to thirty thousand copies of these almanacs each month. The sales potential could not have escaped Bareste, who, like many Nostradamian providers, was trying to make it financially and to improve his position while starting out at the bottom. One finds similar profiles among contemporary mediums, turn-of-the-century occultists, and twentieth-century astrologers and astropsychologists. The self-educated Robert Smith, a product of Bristol’s working class and a contemporary of Bareste, made a name for himself as the magus and astrologer Raphael. In France, where it had generated a tradition of providers, the Nostradamus phenomenon promised success, authority, and perhaps a special kind of renown for individuals whose careers had stalled or never taken off.¹⁷

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All of this carried risks within this middlebrow world. Surrounded by ghosts, wizards, and common folk, Nostradamus was both enticing and unbecoming. The Anthropological Society of London reported that fishermen from Dunkirk had found a fish with the semblance of a human head, deemed it a presage, and linked it to Nostradamus. This was not the company Bareste wished to keep. His challenge was to embrace Nostradamus while preserving his social standing, his reputation, and his self-image. It was to reassure readers—troubled by their own curiosity—by convincing them that they had not veered off the deep end. And it was to sell Nostradamus without sacrificing enrichment to mere entertainment. I am not a “Nostradamite,” Bareste promised, “and even lessilluminated.” Saying so was a good start. So was distinguishing his publications from “trash pamphlets that litter the streets.” But Bareste knew that this was not enough. He would have to set himself apart from Nostradamites in a more explicit fashion.¹⁸

Nostradamites made brash predictions about an ominous future. Bareste, in contrast, spoke prudently—as if using such tools to anticipate what lay ahead broke with the measured language of reason and progress. To be sure, his Nostradamus and Prophetic Almanac mentioned conflagrations, bankruptcies, and other “fatal events” to come. Some contributors uttered traditional warnings about divine ire or else tapped the eschatological fervor of British evangelicals and certain French Catholics. While these movements understood prophecy, the Antichrist, and the imminent return of Jesus Christ in different ways, all sought to process the rise and fall of Napoléon or industrialization through a language of expiation and regeneration that they found in the book of Revelation and prophecies such as Nostradamus’s. The Prophetic Almanac likewise claimed in 1841 that humanity was nearing a pivotal moment during which it would “shiver, suffer, and tremble.” All of this would speak to these people who were now filling notebooks with considerations on the quatrains and France’s apocalyptic travails. Still, apocalyptic predictions were rare in these publications. Bareste presented prophecies about the destruction of Paris as thought-provoking rather than conclusive. He also devoted more pages to ancient prophecies and current events than he did to the future. Given the number of almanacs that had drawn mistaken conclusions from Nostradamus, it was best to wait and see which quatrains came true. The Prophetic Almanac’s editors singled out prophetic impostures and refrained from publishing dire predictions to avoid coming across as irresponsible doomsayers. It was not all about a gloomy future.¹⁹

Nostradamites furthermore approached the quatrains with credulity and biases. They sensationalized and ridiculed the man by departing from his life story and accomplishments. Bareste, in contrast, gave the phenomenon thoughtful consideration. He situated Nostradamus in a long continuum, clarified his language through close grammatical study, and recovered his biography by delving into ancient sources. “Everyone speaks about Nostradamus, and yet no one knows him,” he explained while depicting Nostredame as a devoted doctor and devout prophet whose predictions had sometimes come true. To make him respectable, he coupled divination with scientific veracity and a thirst for curiosities that had become a mainstay of middlebrow media. Just as magazines and newspapers fed their readers a diet of strange but true occurrences, so Bareste presented the quatrains as “curious” entities full of coincidences and puzzling correlations. Antiquaries, librarians, bibliophiles, paleographers, and other learned contemporaries would no doubt enjoy this unusual work. And Bareste himself would become their interlocutor—the first respectable heir of Nostredame in modern times.²⁰

Nostradamites, finally, approached the quatrains with mindless enthusiasm. Bareste, in contrast, came across as convinced, inquisitive, didactic, and even amused. He and other contributors to the Prophetic Almanac did not commit to a single voice or a single understanding of what Nostredame had said about the human condition. Instead, they tiptoed around the predictions. They considered them through one perspective after another or through several perspectives at once. Readers could not anticipate how each successive article in the Almanac would discuss Nostradamus and predictions. Sometimes it was straightforward prophecy. Sometimes it was historical analysis. And sometimes it was something in between. Contributors would sometimes share a prediction and then declare that it might not be true after all. “Before ending our publication, dear reader, we must become less serious (assuming that we had been serious for a moment),” one of them declared. “If future events sadden us, let us laugh while waiting for prophecies to come true.” Other articles announced tongue in cheek that judges would no longer sleep in law courts during the year to come and that couples would cease bickering.²¹

This was not the first time that moderns had gently mocked almanacs and prognostications in this fashion. In 1757, The Modern Nostradamus had provided a calendar while poking fun at this predictive enterprise: “There is no point in warning readers not to believe the Oracles of the New Nostradamus.” By the nineteenth century, such publications often embraced irony. Writers and artists were struggling to reconcile dreams of glory with the demands of a new cultural industry that turned them into journalists or illustrators—mere workers for hire. The market had its rewards, but it also flattened aesthetic originality and moral autonomy. Irony seemed to provide a way out, for it enabled writers and artists to participate in this cultural marketplace while telling their audience—and convincing themselves—that they did not really buy into it. Aware of what was going on in this materialistic world, they remained independent, principled, honorable, and perhaps even pure. Irony could similarly defuse unease about one’s interest in Nostradamus and the supernatural. Sure, I like Nostradamus, Bareste seemed to tell his readers. Sure, I am awed by magical powers. But rest assured: I am not fooled. I am no Nostradamite and neither are you.²²

All of these maneuvers—learning, curiosity, irony—were ultimately about the same thing: exploring Nostradamus, mysteries, and dark recesses while maintaining a safe distance. By steering clear of irrational forces, Bareste bolstered his cultural status as a responsible citizen. By resisting popular inclinations, he outlined his social status as a member of an enlightened middle class. And by detaching himself from the market, he shored up his professional and moral status as a writer. It was not just Bareste. Fraser’s Magazine for Town and Country, a London periodical, reported on Nostradamus’s predictions for 1840 with a straight face but soon promised to cease scanning the future. The journalist assured his readers, and no doubt himself as well, that he was no “superstitious dreamer” who believed in a strange seer from ancient times. Moderns, too, could appreciate the quatrains without endorsing divination. They could have a Nostradamus that suited their times.²³

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The first two editions of Bareste’s Nostradamus sold out within months. Parisian newspapers ran reviews, provincial ones published excerpts, and foreign periodicals reported on this burst of interest in Germany, England, and the United States. Notes and Queries, a staid English journal, presented his book as the go-to source on Nostradamus. Bareste’s widely advertised Prophetic Almanac proved a bigger success yet, with sales of one hundred thousand copies per year. Bareste claimed to have five times as many readers, which is possible. One newspaper reported that no one in France could escape this almanac. Bareste’s 1844 stopover in Toulon, for instance, created considerable stir among local residents. Four years later, a French journalist remarked that people now carried three or four prophecies in their pockets and that no writer had derived more notoriety from this trend than Bareste, whom he called Barestadamus. This word had surfaced in the Almanac’s publicity posters and then stuck. Bareste had made a name for himself, albeit one that was not entirely his own.²⁴

Bareste obtained such success because he met the expectations of many readers. Another relationship to Nostradamus was now coming into its own, and he felt its pulse. While his publications spoke to decoders, awed beholders, and persons of leisure, they were also tailored to those whom we might call ambivalent readers. These men and women delved into the prophetic realm with the same mix of curiosity and self-consciousness as Bareste, the same reservations and shifting convictions, and ultimately the same need for distance. Rather than believing in Nostradamus, we might say that they believed with him, taking a peek (or more) without fully embracing the phenomenon and its powers.

This stance had slowly built up over the centuries. Soon after Nostredame’s death, a French lawyer told a friend that, while he gave little credit to his wild predictions, three lines in quatrain 3.55 had clearly come true while the fourth foretold further commotion. In 1698, a diplomat wrote that he was both curious and dubious about the blacksmith’s encounter with the ghost. By this time, some thinkers suggested openly that belief did not have to be an all-or-nothing proposition. People could believe in different entities with variable degrees of intensity. There was a hazy zone between belief and unbelief, filled with individuals who believed in some unseen forces and not others, or in some forces with greater confidence than in others. “One can be skeptical on one side, and credulous on the other,” declared the philosopher Gottfried Leibniz. He then provided an example: a prominent theatrical engineer believed in Nostredame’s prophecies but not in the Bible’s. This stance became more prevalent as the supernatural grew more intriguing and less acceptable in certain circles. By the early nineteenth century, it captured a widespread relationship to Nostradamus.²⁵

This relationship was not always public, however. Many people were too embarrassed to consult the quatrains outside their homes. If pressed, they might even deny doing so privately. Such furtive readings rarely enter historical records, but traces surface here and there. Traveling through France in 1785, a Polish count met numerous well-to-do individuals with a public passion for science or literature and a private one for supernatural activities. Following the French Revolution, several commentators noted that even gentlemen and ladies were paying secret visits to the fortune-tellers whom they purportedly scorned. While reflecting on the success of Nostradamus and popular almanacs in the 1850s, the journalist Victor Fournel wrote that “for all the airs of superiority and disdain one might put on,” everyone now reads these predictions, “and, for shame, no one dares to admit it.” It would appear that such modes of reading have endured or even swelled since that time. We laugh at Nostradamus’s prophecies, wrote the Atlanta Constitution in 1941, “but secretly practically every one has more or less faith in them.”²⁶

Ambivalent readers were not necessarily convinced that these prophecies really did predict the future. Many could not tell. Others harbored magical thoughts, or engaged in forms of behavior that they could not understand or that they struggled to reconcile with such core values of the modern West as personal control, autonomy, self-mastery, and disdain for ancient superstition. This is why, like people who touch wood for good luck, they turned to the quatrains without fully committing to their efficacy. They hedged and waffled and belittled their own behavior. The Scottish countess who had asked her reverend what Nostradamus had to say about current events in the late eighteenth century also apologized to him for what she called small talk. Sociologists refer to this attitude—at once serious and skeptical, captivated and doubtful—as half-belief. In some cases, the lure is not so much what predictions say as the ritual activities that surround them: parsing obscure words, consulting interpretations, discussing their meaning. Whether Nostradamus was right or not is beside the point. Despite its uncertain status, the phenomenon could bolster confidence in one’s ability to act purposively and intervene in the world.²⁷

It also enabled people to play with their own fears by casting sideways glances at ghastly or stupendous events. Some did so to escape a tedious existence or feel the frisson of safe transgression. Some were dazzled by the kind of artful deception that was at play in circuses and other forms of modern entertainment, a deception that generated feelings of curiosity and bewilderment. Some sought to control their mortality. And some inched closer to what proved frightening in the outside world and perhaps within themselves as well, grasping these things tightly to better defuse them. Play has long attenuated anxiety by keeping true horrors at bay and providing a controlled setting in which people can toy with ideas and sensations. This sensibility, too, has grown more prevalent in modern times. In the late 1930s, young Diesbach de Belleroche, the bank director’s son, felt “a thrill of fear” while listening to adults discussing Nostradamus’s darkest predictions. It took him decades, however, to name his feelings and recognize that a distant, partial, playful relationship with fear could provide relief as well as pleasure.²⁸

The Nostradamian universe, this open and over-the-top province in which everything is incredible yet possible, lends itself admirably to ambivalent readings. Individuals can decide on their own what status to give to predictions that might or might not have true historical origins. The contribution of Bareste and other journalists was to draw this ambivalence into middlebrow media and provide it all: history and legend, past and future, reason and mystery, dismay and reassurance, straight interpretations and quizzical riffs. Bareste helped create a safe space in which a self-consciously modern culture could make Nostradamus its own. He told his readers that they could trust his prophecies, but did not have to. They were free to accept what they wanted, wait a while before coming to a decision, or, if they preferred, not decide at all. They could dabble, experiment, and go as far as as they wished while probing their fears and learning to live with them. This was his answer to La Phalange’s question. Serious people could indeed believe in prophecies. They could do so when and how they desired. And nobody had to know.

*   *   *

In 1848, France went through another revolution. Bathed in egalitarian and fraternal fervor, this rapid affair brought the Republican left to power for the first time since the French Revolution. Within months, however, half the country was hankering for order and security. This included the new president, Louis-Napoléon, who took France in a conservative direction. When his term neared its end, in 1851, he proclaimed himself emperor and, following in the footsteps of his uncle, took the name of Napoléon III. Prophecies flourished during these chaotic years. “More than ever we pose questions to the future,” explained one almanac. “We ask it to illuminate the present, so agitated, so full of thick clouds.” Nostradamus garnered new visibility as well.²⁹

Bareste planned a ten-thousand-copy run of his book under a new title: The Political Prophecies of Michel Nostradamus on Red Republicans and Socialists. The fate of this venture is unclear (I have not located any surviving copies), but Bareste saw other opportunities in this new era. Days after the revolution, he founded a left-wing newspaper that defended political equality, free schooling, and freedom of speech. La République endured for three years despite police raids, fines, and even prison time for Bareste, who was accused of defying censorship laws. When the authorities banned the newspaper in 1851, Bareste had had enough. He decided to leave politics, literature, and prophecy behind and devoted the last decade of his life to business ventures. If he now consulted Nostradamus, he did so privately.³⁰

Eugène Bareste might not have moved on if his ventures had fulfilled his expectations. Yes, his almanacs sold well, but he did not earn enough to erase his debts. Yes, Bareste acquired a measure of fame, but he did not secure the recognition that he craved so intensely. Some newspapers mocked “Eugène Bareste de Nostradamus.” A satirical dictionary mapped with unvarnished cruelty the distance between his ambitions and the place he occupied in the intellectual world. In antiquity, it said, Homer had composed theIliad. In the seventeenth century, playwright Thomas Corneille had penned The Cid. As for the nineteenth century, well, it had Bareste and his almanacs. This dictionary grasped the strains of a prophetic venture that, like middlebrow culture in general, carved uneasy paths between reason and magic, between popular and elite cultures, between market forces and respectability. While Bareste’s open-ended approach resonated with readers, he also came across as too zealous and too coy, too erudite and too mercenary.³¹

Bareste and his almanac nonetheless achieved something of importance, something that endures to this day. They helped crystallize a way of exploring Nostradamus, a way of living with magical forces that many people could not fully accept, a way of resolving the inherent contradictions of a century that saw itself as modern. Writers shed irony once they accepted the market and viewed journalism as a profession rather than a substitute for literary aspirations. This happened in the second half of the nineteenth century. But things were different when it came to divination and magical thinking. Whether in Paris, London, or New York, all kinds of media outlets continued to tap Bareste’s mix of proximity and distance. They provided quatrains and interpretations, praised the prophet’s wisdom or style, found confirmation of current events, and warned of dangers ahead. But they also kept their “old friend Nostradamus” at a safe remove. Some did so by recognizing the limitations of such propheteering and adopting a guarded approach. “Let us essay a quatrain or two,” the periodical All the Year Round cautiously proposed. Others acknowledged that readers would believe only a few prophecies. Still others focused on the talented interpretations rather than the original predictions. All agreed, however, that citizens should arrive at their own opinion about this perplexing matter. “Let our readers judge for themselves,” intoned Household Words.³²

These Nostradamian providers did not simply follow seventeenth-century publishers and invite readers to elucidate the meaning of the Prophecies. They now allowed their readers to determine on their own what status, what truth-value Nostradamus deserved. They left the matter open (or at least claimed to do so). This ambivalence would endure in a modern media culture that coupled seriousness of tone with laughter or incredulity. Countless newspapers continued to discuss quatrains with ostensible earnestness before conceding that fervent followers alone fully believed such obscure, sinister predictions. One of them, the Chicago Daily Tribune, did so in 1941 by framing its interpretation of Nostradamus as hypothetical and then striking a familiar note. Predictions about forty years of blight rattled the mind, said the journalist. “But there is one thing fortunate,” he added, as if channeling La Phalange’s question and the answer that Bareste had provided. “We don’t have to believe it.”³³