Chapter 10

Fin de Siècle Madness

Eugène Bareste outlined one way of living with Nostradamus in the modern world. But when the journalist turned businessman died in 1861, this world was on the cusp of unprecedented changes. People from all walks of life could travel faster and farther than before by hopping on a train. They could acquire and exchange information via telegraphs, the postal service, and cheap newspapers. Strolling down avenues and boulevards, they found themselves surrounded by throngs of people, advertisements, and luminous window displays. There was “noise, commotion, life everywhere,” wrote one novelist about the new cosmopolis and the maelstrom of stimuli that now surrounded and unnerved urban dwellers. In the realm of politics, recently empowered voters attended rallies and public funerals, participated in demonstrations, and sometimes went on strike. Amorphous crowds seemed to propel history. Time appeared to move faster than ever before. The West was becoming a mass society.¹

Was there a place for Nostradamus in this beguiling and unsettling universe? Absolutely. The name was all over the media and jumped to attention every fifteen years or so, in the wake of some crises and in anticipation of others. Around 1900, Europeans and Americans read about Nostradamus in dailies, prophetic pamphlets, and dime novels. They watched him at play in magic shows and short films. They drew from his superlative powers while predicting their own future in dream books. And they purchased clocks, thermometers, calendars, and board games bearing his name or likeness. The legendary seer, the quatrains, and the magical overtones were perfectly suited for a world that was both enthused and dismayed by its own modernity, a world in which persuasion and high emotion seemed to overshadow contained reason, a world that wanted to peer into the future without relinquishing individual volition, a world that sought to contain uncertainty without being convinced that this was possible.

But this did not happen on its own. Nostradamus would not have become an enduring facet of mass society if certain individuals had not grasped these promises. Some of them, like the abbot Henri Torné-Chavigny, came from the religious right and a traditional, provincial milieu. Others, like the pulp author Michel Zévaco, were creatures of the secular left and cosmopolitan Paris. The obscure cleric and the bestselling novelist belonged to different worlds, and yet both publicly linked their name to Nostradamus’s. Both tapped mass media and publicity to reach broad audiences. And both transformed Nostradamus in momentous ways. The entity that they and others like them fashioned at this time captured some of the modern West’s driving urges and anxieties. Not everyone was enthralled with the modern Nostradamus, but it was perfectly at its place.

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Henri Torné-Chavigny loved to recount how he had discovered Nostradamus. It happened in 1858, when the thirty-two-year-old abbot lived in a small parish in southwestern France. One day, bedridden with the flu, he picked up a book that had been sitting unread on his shelf. It was his mother’s worn copy of the Prophecies. He turned the pages absentmindedly, paying little attention until he came across a quatrain that seemed to foretell a recent attempt on the life of Napoléon III. Torné-Chavigny sat up. Could Nostredame have been right? He grabbed a pen and decided to draw crosses next to the quatrains that he could link to past events. By the time he was done, 127 of them filled the margins of his book. There was but one explanation: Nostredame had imitated the book of Revelation, he had left prophecies of biblical scope, and he had called upon Torné-Chavigny, the humble dyer’s son, to clarify their meaning for his countrymen.²

Nostradamus became Torné-Chavigny’s lifelong pursuit. He conducted research in libraries across Europe, acquired more than 120 editions of the Prophecies, pored over them in his study, and wrote detailed analyses of important quatrains. His method of interpretation, which he called adaptation, consisted in tabulating and then correlating all uses of a given word in the book in order to uncover its recurring meaning. Oemathion hence designated Louis XIV. In 1860, Torné-Chavigny published the first of many booklets laying out his interpretations. Others came out at a steady clip during the 1860s and 1870s, along with an occasional Almanac of the Great Prophet. In 1874, he left his parish for Paris. Only there could he complete his mission.³

The abbot’s turn toward Nostradamus both drew from and contributed to a spike of interest in the quatrains. In the United States, for instance, a Nostradamus prediction about the Civil War grew ubiquitous between 1861 and 1865. It was a fake (which few people noticed) and announced that “a great quarrel and contest will arise in a country beyond the seas.” After four years of war, “prostrate and almost ruined, the people will embrace each other in great joy and love.” Launched by the Courrier des Etats-Unis, a newspaper founded by French immigrants to New York, the prediction had spread widely by the end of 1861, when a long conflict seemed likely. Other papers reprinted it and added their own interpretations. The Wisconsin Patriot: a new Democratic administration would usher in postwar harmony. The Columbus Crisis: Northern Democrats would win as long as they waged a war of necessity rather than hatred. The Daily True Delta (New Orleans): if Confederates fought with fortitude, their enemies would embrace them at war’s end. Not one of these newspapers referred to Providence or American exceptionalism while relaying this prediction. None claimed that old prophecies about an elect nation destined to become the New Rome were coming true. Instead, journalists borrowed from and competed with one another while tapping Nostradamus as a political expedient and an intriguing news item. Without becoming as permanent a fixture as it was in France, the American Nostradamus worked in similar ways in the news media.⁴

Torné-Chavigny, too, was consumed with civil war, but a French one. Like other Catholics, he believed that France was sliding toward oblivion. Instead of obeying the Bourbons, the royal family that had been unjustly deposed in 1830, the French were following a degenerate emperor. Instead of leading moral lives, they worked on Sundays, played the stock market, and attended decadent operas. When war erupted against Prussia in 1870, they did not stand a chance. Otto von Bismarck obliterated the French forces, sent Napoléon III into exile, occupied a third of France, and annexed two of its provinces. Defeat at the hands of Protestants was humiliating for the once-glorious Catholic power. As the Prussians laid siege to Paris, workers and supporters of the far left set up a government of the people—the Commune—that soon battled the French army in the streets of the capital. Thousands died; large parts of the city went up in flames. The moderate left then outmaneuvered royalists to establish a secular regime—the Third Republic—which Bourbon diehards felt they were left to battle alone. This string of calamities made many Catholics despondent.

Prophecies flourished—hundreds of them. Georges Bois, a Parisian student who had sought refuge in the Champagne countryside, saw villagers consult all sorts of predictions about the destiny of France. Nostradamus seemed to surface everywhere, and Bois, too, grew intrigued by the quatrains. A German writer who lived in France in the mid-1870s, Bertha von Suttner, distilled this mood in one of her novels. “The country fell into wild despair,” she wrote. “People began to hunt in Nostradamus to find prophecies for the present events, and new seers began to put out fresh predictions.” Some people grew so alarmed by quatrain 3.84 that they refused to set foot in Paris. It was dire indeed:

One journalist claimed to have encountered many people who believed in Nostradamus with greater confidence than they did in the Gospels. Others read the quatrains and found intimations of a reckoning for the fallen nation. By repenting and expiating their guilt, the elect could obtain salvation and usher in the reign of Christ on earth. A renovated church, a restored monarchy, a new moral order—all of this loomed. Millennialism thrived once again.⁵

Torné-Chavigny’s booklets were all the rage, said Georges Bois. The abbot found innumerable signs of the Last Days in the quatrains, from Napoléon’s bloody battles to the Italian campaigns that weakened the papacy’s temporal power. He then predicted the deaths of Italian king Victor Emmanuel II and Pope Pius IX and the return of the French Bourbons under a legitimate king, the comte de Chambord, who would rule as Henri V. This clear, transcendent framework ordered chaotic events while signaling the end of a century-long civil war. It also fed royalist dreams of victory by reactivating the old messianic notion of the Great Monarch as savior. The abbot was not the only one to reclaim Nostradamus in this fashion: all kinds of people did so in articles, songs, and ten-centime pamphlets. But none turned Nostradamus against the Third Republic with as much vigor as Torné-Chavigny. He captured not only the anguish and desolation but also the fiery self-confidence of Catholics who refused to bow before secular reason. Shining forth from his tomb, Nostradamus’s prophetic light would blind materialism and disbelief. Like others, Bois found echoes of his own “hotheaded and unrelenting” royalism in the writings of Torné-Chavigny. Nostradamus’s political arrogation by elements of the Catholic right was now complete in France.⁶

The fearless abbot resolved to fight secular heretics and the republic on their own ground. Lobbying conservative deputies and aristocrats would not suffice. In Paris, he went after left-wing intellectuals and freethinkers. One day, it was Ernest Renan, the controversial historian who had depicted Jesus as a charismatic leader rather than the son of God. Another day, it was Victor Hugo, novelist and political radical. Torné-Chavigny followed the same plan each time: “I will find him, my old Nostradamus in hand, and he will be forced to acknowledge prophecy and miracles.” The black-frocked abbot dropped by during receiving hours and offered to discuss an author whom he had been studying for years. When his host smiled upon hearing this author’s name—this happened every time—Torné-Chavigny was ready with a retort: “With a verse I will shake your skepticism and in five minutes I will make you believe in Nostradamus.” He then pulled out his old edition of the Prophecies and explained how quatrain 8.46—“Cock vs. eagle, three French brothers wait”—illuminated the fates of France’s recent kings. Having sowed doubt (or at least aroused curiosity) in his host’s mind, he pounced with one of the famed verses about Napoléon. Torné-Chavigny was just getting started. Jumping from one quatrain to another, he stretched his five minutes into two hours.⁷

The abbot comes across as the kind of lunatic that Nostradamus conjures up so easily nowadays. Was he not deluded in his belief that Hugo and Renan were enthralled by his performance? Renan paid rapt attention, Torné-Chavigny said, and murmured, “How strange! Your explanations are most clever.” Perhaps, but he did not greet Torné-Chavigny when their paths crossed on a Paris street shortly thereafter. Hugo’s personal secretary recalled years later that the novelist had listened to this cleric only out of amused benevolence. Whether Torné-Chavigny was insane or not (more about his mental state later), he marshaled the quatrains in a public war of attrition.⁸

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Michel Zévaco, in contrast, brought the prophet into a nebulous fictional universe. Three decades younger than the abbot, he had grown up in a military family in Corsica, attended a prestigious Parisian high school, and then bounced around for a while. Penniless after failing his university entrance exam, his name besmirched after a scandalous affair, he became a journalist and ghost writer in the 1880s. He also grew politically active. The young Third Republic was busy restoring France’s standing in the world. It revamped the educational system, conquered huge expanses in Africa, and staged grand universal exhibitions. Still, the opposition would not relent. On the right, anti-Semitic nationalists joined Catholic royalists such as Torné-Chavigny to denounce a corrupt, emasculated regime. On the left, radicals accused it of abandoning equality and fraternity. Zévaco joined their ranks, veering from socialism and rabid anticlericalism to staunch anticapitalist anarchism. But two prison sentences and infighting among militants led him to shift course. By 1900, the firebrand had become one of the most famous novelists in France, serialized in major dailies.⁹

Zévaco had worked long enough in journalism to understand how the industry operated. Newspaper publishers now owned their own printing machinery, cut distribution deals with railroad companies, advertised massively, and sold millions of issues at low prices every day. To entice and retain readers, they published crime novels, melodramas, and adventures in serial form. Zévaco set his historical novels in the sixteenth century. He began each one by researching the topic, filling out hundreds of note cards, and outlining 144 installments of equal length. Then he began writing. He was so good that Le Matin, one of the leading Parisian dailies, offered him a six-book contract in 1905. The newspaper had initially followed the American example and marketed itself as a source of news. When sales did not follow, its new owner dropped the newsstand price, placed a premium on entertainment and opinion, and published up to three serials at once, all of them by famous writers. Zévaco’s first novel for Le Matin earned him a 40 percent raise. He immediately began work on another one, advertised as a “novel full of magic, a novel of love, a swashbuckling novel.” It had a one-word title: Nostradamus.¹⁰

The novel, which began publication in the summer of 1907, involved imagined characters alongside historical figures such as Catherine de Médicis. This saga was full of romantic subplots, sword fights, ghastly torture scenes, deceitful villains, and court intrigues. The two main protagonists were the magician Nostredame and his (fictional) son, the dashing, valiant Renaud. After avenging the death of his mother, wrongfully burned at the stake as a witch, Renaud defended his paramour from similar accusations. Zévaco followed the formula of swashbuckling novels: star-crossed lovers, a damsel in distress, a hero triumphing over obstacles, vengeance, and a mysterious world that slowly comes to light. In one of the key scenes, Renaud travels to his father’s tomb and unearths his will. The parchment enjoins him to enter the bosom of the Great Sphinx and unveil the secret of the Enigma: “During your descent into the belly of the earth, make for yourself a heart of bronze, a mind of fire, a soul of diamond.”¹¹

This eerie Nostradamus had made his way from theater fairs and pantomimes to historical plays and novels. In an 1829 melodrama, Nostradamus the consigliore tapped magical forces while warning traitorous dukes that God would seek vengeance. A few years later, Balzac included Nostradamus within Catherine de Médicis’s college of astrologers and alchemists. By the end of the century, youth magazines and bestselling romances were depicting a wizard who unraveled all things hidden. Nostradamus was at once a deus ex machina and a magical character that moved the plot forward through spells and predictions. He summoned a fiery Renaissance, caught between political passions and mysterious forces. And he blurred the distinction between the natural and the supernatural.¹²

Zévaco now linked Nostradamus to the occult forces that were gaining so many devotees in middle-class circles. Whether in Europe or in the United States, millions of men and women felt that their spiritual needs were unmet. Science explained everything in materialistic terms, while organized religion rested on unproven miracles and antiquated dogma (such as hell and the savior) that contradicted modern values. These people longed for an enchanted yet secular and egalitarian world in which the uninitiated could feel the presence of unseen powers and connect with the afterworld. Some found this in hypnosis. Others, known as spiritualists, communicated with the dead via mediums, levitation, rapping tables, photographs of ghosts, and other observable phenomena. They sometimes believed in reincarnation, which promised eternal life and improvement for the soul. Yet other people were now searching for hidden wisdom in Hebrew, Egyptian, and Far Eastern doctrines—to which they might add alchemy, numerology, and astrology. Members of the theosophical school thus harvested Western and Eastern traditions to uncover a universal, harmonious, inclusive spirit.¹³

A new occultist milieu was taking form, with its meetings and magazines and public lectures. Zévaco himself had explored rapping tables and the esoteric wisdom of the seventeenth-century Rosicrucian brotherhood while in jail. It is not a coincidence, therefore, that one of his novels features the Great Sphinx of Giza. Occultists were fascinated with an Egyptian civilization that, as they saw it, had been saturated with wisdom, justice, and mysteries that opened onto the afterworld. Egyptian motifs and artifacts could now be found in museums, tarot decks, and orders such as the Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor. The courageous Renaud ventured into the dark passages of a pyramid in which shrill voices wailed from distant recesses. Like a modern-day Indiana Jones, he overcame maggots and skeletons and chambers whose walls closed in on him. Eventually, three magi launched him on a twenty-one-year initiation into the Supreme Rosicrucian Secret. If successful, Renaud would not only save his loved one but also grasp universal wisdom and master the world.¹⁴

Nostradamus’s relationship with this occultist milieu was anything but simple, however. Madame Blavatsky, the Russian émigré who had cofounded the Theosophical Society, praised the astrologer for foreseeing the Crimean War. Some of her followers likewise depicted Nostredame as a clairvoyant who believed in reincarnation and attained ecstasy through incantation rituals and kabbalistic lore. Like Hindu scripture, his prophecies announced that humanity would soon pass from one five-thousand-year cycle (or yuga) to another. But many occultists and spiritualists had a hard time accepting Nostradamus. Not only was the Egyptian connection a stretch, but they found neither secret teachings nor natural laws of history nor verifiable messages from the dead in the Nostradamian universe. More important, these individuals saw themselves as a spiritual vanguard, probing arcane mysteries that lay beyond the reach of common folk. Nostradamus was simply too popular, too low-end. Contemporary astrologers who entertained professional ambitions felt the same way. Dozens of periodicals—with titles like Modern Astrology, Modern Spiritualism, and The Occult World—never mentioned his name at the turn of the century. Some primers on occultism even distinguished authentic telepathic perceptions from his ludicrous prophecies. In this domain, too, collective movements and institutions that aspired to respectability tended to steer clear of the combustible Nostradamus.¹⁵

Zévaco did not entertain such high-minded qualms. Perhaps it was because of his politics. Socialists and utopian thinkers had been combining spiritual language, social reform, and millennialist hopes for decades. Left-wing currents shared with occultism a belief in hidden truths, the prospect of social harmony, and faith in a glorious age to come. Some of the men and women who flocked toward spiritualism did so, similarly, because it turned Catholic dogma upside down and embraced equality and progress. The Revue spirite, founded by the famed spiritualist Allan Kardec, thus ran articles about eradicating poverty alongside pieces on mediums and divining rods. Spiritual forces could stem the capitalist tide that was draining modern life of its vital energy.¹⁶

Belle Époque anarchists and radical artists such as Wassily Kandinsky frequented occultist circles and were enthralled by what they found: namely, freedom from bourgeois conventions, pure reason, and materialism. Occult forces and art would draw people out of their lethargy and alter their outlook on the world. Such convictions, coupled with appreciation for the sheer force of Nostradamus’s language, drew members of the avant-garde toward a Renaissance poet who had anticipated their own efforts to devise new relationships between words and the world. He, too, had shaken the grounds of representation by subverting language from the inside. In the Prophecies as in their art, grammatical breaches disturbed literary conventions while random moves disrupted the expectations of readers. The French author Guillaume Apollinaire, who saw magic as a source of new knowledge, praised Nostredame as a great poet in 1915. A year later, members of the Dada movement accidentally discovered Nostradamus in Zurich and felt an immediate sense of kinship. These disconcerting yet brilliant quatrains stretched language to its breaking point. “Nostradamus’s mystical poetry resembled the experimentations of our abstract poetry,” the Romanian artist Marcel Janco explained. “Our poets found in his writings echoes of, and similarities with our new ideas.” Literary and political disorder came together.¹⁷

Zévaco was no avant-gardist, but his novel did turn Nostradamus into a critic of the king’s authoritarian rule. Regardless of his political designs, he also drew Nostradamus and his readers into a magical universe in which Egyptian lore, extrasensory communication, Rosicrucian secrets, and prophetic voices were all but equivalent. All fell under the catchall rubric of magic, which occupied a unique place in nascent mass society. Magic was the counterpoint of modern reason, and yet it captured a fascination with the mysterious, transformative powers of industry, technology, and the market. Nowhere was this fascination more palpable than in show business and popular entertainment. As commercial magic reached its peak, Nostradamus made its way from aristocratic salons and popular almanacs to this corner of mass culture.¹⁸

Zévaco was not the only one to draw the phenomenon into this realm. The popular magician Harry Kellar toured the United States as the “American Nostradamus” in the late nineteenth century while his Hungarian counterpart Hugo went further and performed dressed as Nostradamus. In Paris, Georges Méliès staged “fantastic illusions”—theatrical shows that mixed magic, illusions, and phantasmagoria. One of his 1891 productions was titled “The Tricks of the Moon, or the Misadventures of Nostradamus.” The extravagant, bearded, wizard-like character traveled to the moon and was swallowed up by the celestial body. In 1920s Los Angeles, the Ambassador Hotel held daily performances by “the mystifying, sensational Nostradamus who was buried alive [and] will demonstrate his unsolved, phenomenal, and psychic feats.” American and British consumers could also buy booklets that imparted Nostradamus’s alleged methods for invoking spirits. One of them, entitled Art Magic, told readers to select a pristine crystal, ask to see the name of their guardian spirit, and then request advice. The Complete Fortune-Teller had a different approach. Hold the cutout “magic mirror of Nostradamus,” it said, and then ask your question while softly uttering the seer’s solemn invocation: Eludor Mirpan Gulith Harcon Dibo.¹⁹

The marriage among Nostradamus, the supernatural and the occult (however one defined them), and magic was thus consummated in this commercial realm. There, people from all social backgrounds could obtain secret teachings, guidance, self-help, and distraction. The proportions were left to their own discretion.

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Henri Torné-Chavigny devoted all of his energy to a prophetic crusade that would return France to its glory days. Michel Zévaco, in contrast, spent but a year in Nostradamus’s company and fashioned a magical universe in which ordinary folk prevailed over princes and prelates. Both men nonetheless understood that what the abbot called the rise of the masses was changing their world in irreversible ways. Both accordingly resolved to reach these masses by coupling Nostradamus with mass media, advertising, and promotion.

This came naturally to the newspaperman Zévaco. Le Matin organized massive marketing campaigns on behalf of its star authors. Its budget for Nostradamus—roughly two million dollars in today’s currency—marked a 50 percent increase over his previous novel. During the weeks that preceded the first installment, daily teasers built up excitement within the pages of the newspaper. No two were alike. The daily also distributed 3.5 million brochures across France and put up more than twenty-five thousand color posters in train stations, outside newspaper stands, and on the advertising columns that dotted the boulevards. Some posters were ten feet high. There was no way to escape Zévaco’s Nostradamus.²⁰

Torné-Chavigny, too, did everything he could to spread his brand of prophecy. The performances he put on for Renan and Hugo resided somewhere between the magic show and the lecture. In order to reach different readerships, he produced high-priced editions of his works as well as cheap facsimiles, almanacs, posters, and brochures of various sizes. To impress his interlocutors, he made use of popular literary devices (depicting himself, for instance, as David who battled a left-wing Goliath). To promote his publications, he sent advance copies to five hundred eminent clergymen, writers, and newspaper editors. To secure funding, he assured potential advertisers that customers would consult his almanacs throughout the year. To increase sales, he set up a mail-order business that offered bulk prices. And to garner attention, he staged the kind of promotional stunts that were becoming commonplace in the press. Uncover a single lie in my statements about the Prophecies, he promised, and receive a thousand francs! Like the French Catholics who financed the Sacré-Cœur Cathedral in Montmartre by selling personalized bricks, like the English Methodists who combined evangelism with leisure, like the American devotional promoters who advertised new cults of saints, Torné-Chavigny blended traditional belief and modern commerce.²¹

He added something else, of course: the unorthodox Nostradamus. Torné-Chavigny and Zévaco both grasped and enhanced its appeal for a mass culture that needed accessible, easy-to-use content for a broad readership and dailies that relied on an uninterrupted flow of material. Whether as serious prediction or playful entertainment, Nostradamus now provided fodder for all sections of the newspaper: news articles about the latest interpretations, editorial columns opining on their validity, dispatches from foreign correspondents, historical features, serialized novels, and wire copy. Most often, readers came across his name in the short items that editors used to fill their columns. These terse entries presented predictions that had come true over the ages, discussed curious interpretations, or related odd stories. In 1860, the Milwaukee Sentinel ran an item about a librarian who had seen a deceased patron enter the stacks at night to consult the Prophecies. Why not?²²

This mass culture thus welcomed and magnified the visibility of Nostradamus. In doing so, however, it also transformed the phenomenon in long-lasting ways.

Until this time, most readings of Nostradamus had brought together past, present, and future—while remaining cautious when it came to prediction. The abbot and the novelist, however, looked squarely toward the future. Torné-Chavigny, in particular, provided a precise account of what lay ahead. Newspapers, too, now reported on predictions about the demise of emperors, the death of popes, and political upheavals. All of this happened at a time in which, as Utah’s Deseret News put it, getting “a peep into the future” became a craze. The colossal scale and pace of change confronted Americans and Europeans with an unstable present and a future that loomed ever closer. Everything about the modern world seemed unpredictable, from the financial markets to geopolitics to the rhythms of everyday life. This is why people now turned to commodity futures, crop estimates, or weather forecasts. It is also why they paid attention to biblical prophecies, trance mediums, and fortune-tellers who charged five cents for their insights. The art of prediction and the science of prospection blended into a business and a national necessity. Both promised to control time and lessen the doubt and uncertainty that weighed on so many people.²³

It was not always merry tidings, however. Torné-Chavigny announced the destruction of Paris and the end of the world at the close of the twentieth century. Whether this marked the Rapture was not clear to all readers. Zévaco’s Nostradamus entered an ominous netherworld where terror penetrated him to the marrow. The popular English novelist Stanley Weyman, otherwise known as the “prince of romance,” had Nostredame ride the Great White Horse of Death in one of his books. Newspapers followed suit. In 1904, theWashington Post and other American papers ran a short story in which the prophet laughed scornfully while announcing disasters. Such papers also published serious articles about Nostradamus’s warnings regarding imminent calamities, such as Paris running red with blood in 1900. Thirty years later, the downmarket Dimanche illustré promoted an article on Nostradamus by proclaiming that “the dark kingdom of the afterworld is here.” Tabloids and respectable newspapers may have used different languages, but they pulled their readers into the same gloomy universe.²⁴

While darkness had surrounded the Prophecies from the start, earlier interpreters and ordinary folk had also emphasized reassuring or self-affirming facets. “The more I probe the chaos of the future,” explained one 1792 interpreter, “the more I see marvels and tyrants perish.” In the late nineteenth century, however, the balance shifted toward doom. The Prophecies are like a fireworks show in the darkest of skies, explained one commentator in 1867. This evolution owed as much to religious revivalism as it did to turn-of-the-century anxieties and media operations. Some people were deeply shaken by the vast transformations under way in the West. In France alone, peasants moved to cities and industrial centers; universal suffrage transformed the political game; religious observance declined; Jewish immigrants seemed to imperil national identity; women made bids for independence. No one was grounded anymore. Distant economic forces could alter everything from afar. Civilization, one writer lamented, “no longer knows where it is going, toward what nights, into what abysses it is drawn.”²⁵

Fears about forthcoming cataclysms, apocalyptic or not, grew intense. With 1900 on the horizon, some Christians believed that massacres in Armenia or insurrections in Cuba announced the end of the world. Theosophists held that the passage from one yuga to another would involve unimaginable horrors in 1897. A series of natural disasters—the Krakatoa volcanic eruption of 1893, the San Francisco earthquake of 1906, the Paris flood of 1910—led scientists and journalists to suggest that Earth’s crust was not quite done and that human civilization had come too soon. Even Emile Zola, the level-minded French novelist, confessed to sensing “the end of everything,” an end that he linked premonitorily to a vast pan-European conflict. The untold pages that newspapers devoted to such cataclysms—not to mention accidental deaths in the modern city—tapped the full range of human emotions, including trepidation. Whether thrilling or alarming, the hues of wonder grew ever more somber.²⁶

The West seemed to want or need a prophet of doom to play with its fears, conjure them, and anchor them in a meaningful collective framework. Nostradamus was perfect for the part. There was no mythic story or discernible moral content to redeem the man. There were no institutions to object to this dark incarnation. And it was easy to dive into this ocean of words and emerge with apocalyptic strands, searing scenes of horror, and a long line of catastrophic events that now reached their pinnacle. Journalists did so with relish. Sometimes, they claimed that Nostradamus announced a major cataclysm—or worse. At other times, they found confirmation of a crisis or its outcome. Witness the U.S. Civil War, when Nostradamus was filtered into America not only through new media, but also via an apocalyptic language that led Northerners and Southerners alike to depict themselves as the righteous side in a holy war pitting good and evil. In the early 1880s, the following prophecy attracted widespread attention:

When on St. George’s Day the Crucifixion,

And Jesus Rising on St. Mark’s Day fall;

And John the Baptist bear him, great affliction

Upon the world shall come, the end of all.

Commentators agreed on its meaning: the world would end the next time that, in a given year, Good Friday fell on St. George’s Day, Easter on St. Mark’s Day, and Corpus Christi on St. John’s Day. This rare trifecta loomed in 1886. Whether they endorsed this prediction or not, most newspapers claimed that Nostradamus had written it (false!) and that it had first appeared on a marble tablet in Germany. By the early 1880s, the quatrain was discussed in Munich, Trieste, New York, and countless other cities. King Ludwig II of Bavaria found it haunting. Theological publications suggested it as a seed thought for sermons. Some occultists paid close attention, but mostly the prophecy circulated in the mass press, which told readers that the fatal year would witness the downfall of European monarchies, the advent of communism, or “the End of the World at Hand.”²⁷

This prediction surfaced in several locations at once—Europe, the United States, and the British Commonwealth—and promised to affect all of humankind. The famous all-encompassing Nostradamus suited an age of transatlantic cables and wire services, when newspapers borrowed from others across the oceans and reported increasingly on distant events. Yes, the phenomenon had resonated in multiple countries during earlier centuries. Yes, Nostradamus retained pride of place in France. Foreign correspondents continued to report on his predictions about the French. And yes, some crises resonated in only a single country. The European press all but ignored the Nostradamus prediction that had surfaced in American newspapers during the U.S. Civil War, for instance. But the 1886 Nostradamian effervescence was an instantaneous worldwide event, capable of feeding Christian apocalypticism as well as secular notions of world’s end.²⁸

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The mysterious name of Nostradamus endowed this prediction of uncertain provenance with a lineage from the fogs of time and what one journalist called “another authority for the date of the world’s doom.” This was enough: there was little need to identify the author or justify the prophecy’s authenticity. Once Torné-Chavigny had rehabilitated the great prophet Nostradamus, he focused on stand-alone verses rather than his life story or legendary adventures. As for Zévaco, he turned Nostradamus into a minor character in the story of a young hero. The posters that advertised his novel depicted Renaud in the midst of a skirmish while screaming in bold, oversize, bright-red letters: NOSTRADAMUS. With the man out of the picture, the name shined brightest. This was the final transformation of Nostradamus in mass society.²⁹

Some people had gravitated toward the name before. In the seventeenth century, polemicists signed articles as Nostradamus the Hobbler while playwrights depicted characters as “old Nostradamus.” A century later, the writer Horace Walpole described a mystical acquaintance as a cousin of Nostradamus. The name served as invective, too. Here is the poet John Dryden, in a stanza on prophets: “Each Nostradamus can foretell with ease … / One casual truth supports a thousand lying rhymes.” By the mid-1800s, contemporaries claimed that it did not matter whether Nostradamus had written his prophecies in 1555 or not. It sufficed that some person—anyone, really—had composed predictions before the fact and attributed them to Nostradamus, and that these predictions seemed to have been on target. Around 1900, contemporaries agreed that “little is generally known of Nostradamus but his name.” Given the growing distance between cultural producers and consumers in mass culture, this is all that was required.³⁰

Nostredame’s biography had faded because it lacked committed advocates. (The four hundredth anniversary of his birth went unnoticed in 1903.) The legend that had then taken center stage faced the opposite problem: a lack of natural limitations. Without a mythic narrative or institutions to keep it together, Nostradamus sprouted in innumerable directions. The prophet and the magician, the ghost and the alchemist existed separately, but they also melded into an all-purpose wizard. There was a whiff of medieval and Renaissance forces in this evolution from a living prophet to an imaginary character. But Nostradamus also became something else: one of these instantly recognizable stock figures, or stereotypes, that writers and journalists began to use to communicate quickly and distill complex notions for a diverse readership. The era needed a way of talking about this otherworldly realm and its secret forces, arcane teachings, and sundry forecasts. It needed an emblematic figure whom it could praise, sell, or invoke to generate magic, mystery, and meaning. Nostradamus fit the bill. In the process, he became a necromancer, a crystal seer, and a medium as well. Some of Zévaco’s advertisements depicted him in a magician’s workshop, complete with a workbench, skulls, a stuffed owl, and hieroglyph-like signs. “Magic! Conjuring the dead! Telepathy! Divination! Knowledge of the Future!” they exclaimed. “What is this strange science that suddenly, in our own time, seems to be rising from its ashes?” Whatever it might be, Nostradamus encompassed it all.³¹

This stock figure grew so ubiquitous that the image of the wizard became superfluous. The name alone remained in the forefront, louder and freer and more enticing than ever. This name was not only a verbal shortcut and an authority but also a brand. Almanacs had long lured buyers by claiming Nostradamus as their author. As time went on, some publishers stopped including quatrains or sketches of the prophet. They simply attached the name. In Edwardian London, a certain Gabriel Nostradamus published a primer on the unseen world while a Professor L. Nostradamus sold horoscopes by mail order. Untethered from the man, floating above distant legends, the brand revolved around wonder, mesmerizing gloom, and paranormal powers of unknown origin. The fleeting name enhanced the lure of a mechanism whose own workings seemed as puzzling as those of mass society. One thing was clear: the Nostradamus phenomenon found within itself and within history new sources of energy. After that, people could use it however they so desired.³²

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Neither Torné-Chavigny nor Zévaco allowed Nostradamus to stand alone, however. Instead, both mingled their own names with his and then placed theirs on top. Le Matin’s promotional campaigns ultimately revolved around Zévaco, the “great popular storyteller” whose dramatic intuition would resurrect vanished eras. Torné-Chavigny presented himself as Nostredame’s chosen heir, a national prophet whom the quatrains had depicted as “luisant torné” (this could be translated as ornate and shining, but it was the reference to his name and the resemblance to Jean-Aimé de Chavigny’s that mattered). While Chavigny had published his own compendium of prophecies, he had not talked about himself ad nauseam or depicted himself as Nostredame’s quasi-divine translator. Nor had Eugène Bareste, whose main contribution was a complete edition of the Prophecies. By the late nineteenth century, interpretations, tales, and Nostradamian providers came to the forefront. The reasons for this include doubts about the masses’ ability to judge the quatrains on their own and the growth of the entertainment and forecasting industries. The pressures of self-promotion also came into play. The abbot and the novelist had both entered fiercely competitive domains, filled with clerics who deemed themselves prophets and novelists who claimed to speak to the people. It was impossible to succeed without putting one’s name forward.³³

Torné-Chavigny and Zévaco both became media celebrities. In Paris, Catholic bookstores near the Saint-Sulpice Church placed the abbot’s brochures in their windows. Leading politicians and the pope’s secretary of state read his interpretations. Royalist pamphleteers used them as ammunition. Many readers thanked him personally for providing relief and the hope of forthcoming deliverance. Translations and commentaries came out in Spain and Denmark. Zévaco’s star kept on rising as well. In 1909, the Fayard publishing house released his Nostradamus in its new highly profitable collection of dime novels. Like so many others, the young Jean-Paul Sartre read with delight “that author of genius [who] had invented, under the influence of Hugo, the republican cloak-and-dagger novel.” Zévaco, the onetime anarchist, moved his family to a posh Parisian suburb and vacationed in Monte Carlo.³⁴

The operations of the press, the strategies of cultural producers, the expectations of readers, and the demands of modern life all came into play to reconfigure Nostradamus. They divorced the man from biography, projected his words into the future, and drew it all into dark recesses. With its mix of reliable reports and fears, mysteries, and thrills that seemed to escape rationality, Nostradamus was perfectly at home in a media culture that struggled to separate fact and fiction. The phenomenon’s evolution thus responded to publicity, titillation, and sensationalism. But there was more. By tapping a vast range of emotions, Nostradamus could help people manage the sensory overload of modern life. By depicting somber realms and tomorrows, it could bolster their immunity before the unpredictability of this life. And by delving into past, present, and future, it lessened feelings of uncertainty while, like the new media, allowing contemporaries to encounter and perhaps tame a history that was now unfurling so quickly, a history that seemed ever more remote and yet ever so present in their daily lives now that distant events seemed simultaneous and far-flung countries seemed connected. The parallels with the Renaissance Nostradamus are as glaring as the disparities.³⁵

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This kind of success drew scrutiny and hostility. In his own time, Bareste had been mocked as the Stradumuste, a wordplay on Nostradamus’s name and Bareste’s pseudo expertise. Torné-Chavigny became the “sorcerer abbot” or torz né, a wordplay around his name that meant twisted nose (and perhaps lying scoundrel). Salon’s town historian scolded him for feeding an impatient readership unverifiable predictions about a distant future. In England, a journalist used more graphic language to deride the “crotchety fellow who has racked up a prophecy of Nostradamus out of the dusty limbo of the past and is shaking it before the eyes of the world as a terrier shakes a rat.”³⁶

As in earlier centuries, people went out of their way to vilify Nostradamus. But the main concern changed once again. “Even in this present century the name of Nostradamus has weight,” regretted Boston’s Every Saturday in 1874. “Astrology is dead—true; but the spirit which led to a belief in astrology is not.… What else mean the Spiritualist journals, the séances, the mediums?” How, in other words, could the patently false spirit of Nostradamus take on new spiritual and commercial forms in this modern era? It was pointless to blame the hapless soothsayer or the hordes that yearned to know the future. They did not know any better. No, the true culprits were the peddlers of miracles, the fanatics who made Nostradamus a prophet in spite of himself, the callous commentators who did not always believe their own interpretations. Such complaints had been voiced before, but the nineteenth century granted them new inflexions and a new urgency.³⁷

The forces of religion and reason both found cause for concern. The eminent bishop of Orléans accused Torné-Chavigny of drawing disoriented readers toward chimeras and absolving them of responsibility for their mistakes. He also felt that Torné-Chavigny’s millennialism and unyielding opposition to the republicans in power would harm the Catholic cause. But Torné-Chavigny did not secure a consensus even in millennialist circles. Some ultra-Catholic apocalyptic authors asked how this provincial cleric could present himself as the leading prophet of modern times while trusting a crazed old magician. Devout Catholics would lose their faith and their minds in this magical morass. On the other end of the spectrum, rationalists put Torné-Chavigny’s prophecies on a par with belief in werewolves. America’s leading nature writer, John Burroughs, debunked the notion that Nostradamus had predicted the end of the world for 1886. Nothing displayed more clearly the chasm between scientific facts and those “personal wants, fears, hopes, [and] weaknesses” that prophecy and theology exploited. While science was coming into its own in universities, laboratories, and popular journals, there was no agreement regarding its methods and designs. Nor were its dikes necessarily strong enough to withstand the attacks of ignorant amateurs, religious devotees, and resurgent astrologers. The magical spirit endured—and, like science, it sought to unravel the hidden principles of nature. Budding, shaken, or insecure institutions once again went after Nostradamus to shore up their legitimacy.³⁸

It was their powers of persuasion that made Nostradamian providers so threatening. Religion and science denounced a moral danger, a modern-age con, and “prophets of evil” who played the fear card. The bishop of Orléans and Pierre Larousse, the editor of the left-wing dictionary that bears his name, were political enemies, but they agreed that Torné-Chavigny made an entire generation tremble before apocalyptic calamities. Reports about the “mysterious and blood-curling prediction of evil” for 1886 had the same effect. This was one reason to denounce the modern Nostradamuses. The other one was their craving for personal gain. In his time, Nostredame had cornered the Renaissance almanac market. In theirs—a time of unprecedented commercialism—individuals sold Nostradamus in all venues at the expense of truth. Starting in the late eighteenth century, detractors had used Nostradamus to condemn a marketplace that promoted shams, greed, and deception. The main character of the 1779 play Nostradamus, or the Pleading Physician was a doctor and lawyer who misled public opinion by hectoring and penning misleading pamphlets. Later, Bareste was accused of hawking his almanacs wherever he could. Money trumped principles. The speculator Torné-Chavigny likewise sold empty oracles to gullible consumers.³⁹

Intent on becoming as famous as the Renaissance astrologer, these Nostradamian providers captured broader anxieties about deception, commercial fraud, and speculators who created something out of nothing in order to better themselves. This, too, reflected a deeper trend. The eighteenth and (especially) nineteenth centuries made it easier for people from humble backgrounds to rise up in society, obtain public recognition, and even become celebrities. Thanks to the mass press, ordinary citizens now felt as if they could gain intimate proximity to writers, artists, or virtuosos whom they had never met. “The best path to success these days is to get oneself noticed,” declared the writer Chateaubriand. In literature and politics and countless other professions, self-promotion seemed to veer out of control. People appeared to care more about personal distinction than they did about their fellow citizens or higher ideals. They said or did whatever it took to earn attention and, alas, they succeeded all too often. Loud celebrity was drowning out self-sacrificing glory.⁴⁰

The Nostradamus phenomenon expressed this feature of the modern world as well. Detractors lambasted “the much too famous Nostradamus,” the man who had spurned medical glory for astrological fame, the alleged genius who had obtained more attention than industrious yet modest citizens. He had “taken advantage of his era’s dominant ideas to obtain recognition and wealth,” explained Salon’s town historian in 1883. “Were he alive today, he would meet our century’s standards and hold his own among our modern celebrities.” But if Nostradamus had become the world’s leading astrological celebrity, if his posthumous fame surpassed that of Shakespeare (as some asserted), it was again because these new Nostradamian providers were manufacturing their own celebrity by amplifying his. Detractors now linked Bareste to the deification of fame and berated Torné-Chavigny for turning the press into a self-serving pulpit. All of these providers were offspring of a society that allowed ambition and magic tricks to eclipse virtue and honest exchanges.⁴¹

The nineteenth century called upon many stereotypes and fictional characters to make sense of rapid transformations. Frankenstein famously served as an admonition against misguided hubris. Nostradamus was not alone. Still, the phenomenon was distinctive. It embodied the persistence of archaic beliefs, but it also came across as modern in its reliance on media, its connection to spiritualism, its freedom from old institutions, and its appeal to striving, fame-hungry providers. Like the fortune-tellers who seemed to be sprouting on every street corner, these swindlers preyed on unsuspecting men and women and threatened the nation’s work ethic and social stability. When people needed reassurance against these changes—changes that recast their world and their place within it and perhaps the way they viewed themselves—they could push back against Nostradamus and his modern epigones. The name, too, was good to think against in late modern times.⁴²

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In 1880 an old man approached a newspaperman at a royalist meeting in Paris. He introduced himself—Henri Torné-Chavigny—and began speaking passionately about Nostradamus’s predictions for the years to come. After listening to him for a few minutes, the newspaperman interjected that some of his interpretations had failed to come true in recent years. Such objections merely fueled the abbot’s ardor. The man still enjoyed a good fight. Following the death of Pius IX in 1878 and the consolidation of France’s Third Republic, a regime that many Catholics eventually came to accept, eschatological fires lost some of their incandescence. Torné-Chavigny was now scrimping by. He relied on the hospitality of a Catholic printer near Saint-Sulpice. A doctor who ran into him a few months after the political meeting was struck by his manic agitation. Perhaps the abbot was insane after all.⁴³

Many people thought so. Pierre Larousse deemed him fit for the asylum. A rival interpreter dismissed his approach as “utterly eccentric.” Mainstream Catholics depicted the abbot and others like him as unhinged minds whose enthusiasm for the Prophecies was as crazed as spiritualism. Nostredame had been dismissed as a lunatic before (even in his own time), but the entire phenomenon now generated medical diagnoses. When a Cambridge undergraduate began reciting quatrains, his classmates depicted him as prey to nervous obsessions. Journalists likewise consigned Torné-Chavigny, mediums, and séances to “that long chapter of human folly which treats of men’s distrust of themselves.” As psychiatry came into its own as both a profession and a discipline, references to insanity began to surface in all kinds of places. Journalists, writers, lawyers, and others used this language with equal abandon. One had to be crazy, they said, to associate oneself with Nostradamus in the present age.⁴⁴

The abbot’s true mental state matters less than the way people perceived him. But Torné-Chavigny certainly was mad if we eschew medical definitions and instead view madness as an unwavering commitment to one’s worldview, regardless of the consequences. Whereas melancholy people resign themselves to the order of things, madmen fashion their own reality. Torné-Chavigny was prepared to rewrite the rules in order to carry out his vision for France. He never changed course or questioned himself. This is why he earned a place within the studies of literary madmen that began appearing in France in the early 1880s. These were defined as idiosyncratic authors who devoted all of their energy to disseminating their extravagant views. Afflicted by delusions of grandeur and a persecution complex, these philosophers, mystics, and alchemists toiled tirelessly for a vindication that would never come.⁴⁵

The label of madman relegated to the margins individuals who were deemed abnormal. This is where Torné-Chavigny and Nostradamus ended up. The abbot brought the quatrains into an arcane subculture of Catholic dissidents, nostalgic reactionaries, esoteric devotees, and occultist journalists that married conservative tirades with apparitions, hypnosis, and apocalyptic prophecy. Following Torné-Chavigny’s death in 1880, a rural priest from northern France retired to a reliquary-filled presbytery and spent sixty-three years completing his grand work. In the early 1900s, occultist periodicals received letters from subscribers regarding Torné-Chavigny and Nostradamus’s predictions about the demise of Paris or the return of the Great Monarch. Meanwhile, Zévaco and the like drew the phenomenon into a sensationalist maelstrom of media and entertainment that appealed to the lowest common denominator. Other books were similarly caught up in the century’s commercial culture, including the Bible. Publishers now put out family Bibles, customized King James Bibles, and illuminated Bibles with embossed leather covers. The holy book was a mass product, with more than a million copies published each year in the United States. But biblical entrepreneurs knew that their reinventions could go only so far. And the Bible retained its respectability. It was a decorative object in Victorian parlors and a key component of American presidential inaugurations. The Bible “carries a dignity with it that is found in very few other lines of business,” declared one catalog. Nostradamus, in contrast, grew ever more dubious and illegitimate.⁴⁶

And yet the phenomenon was not confined to barren cultural borderlands. Refashioned for mass consumption, the glowering predictions and floating name infused the respectable center on both sides of the Atlantic. The New York Times published considered reports on Torné-Chavigny’s interpretations in the late 1870s. In 1913, a respected speaker presented Nostradamus’s views before an audience of high-society Parisian ladies. And three decades later, the Los Angeles Times discussed the predictions of an old French prophet who had reportedly studied Egyptian lore. With his single-minded focus and his grip on new media, his sense of self-importance and limitless possibilities, his ability to mix emotional appeal and deduction, his hopes and fears and (perhaps) psychoses, the madman found his place within a mass society that requested surefire forecasts while accepting the unpredictability of modern life. He captured the era’s awkward dances between magical thinking and rational assumptions about causality and progress. In so doing, he tapped the era’s thirst for meaning and relief, destiny and delight, play and certainty—all of them at once. The modern Nostradamus, too, crossed boundaries.⁴⁷