Epilogue
It all began in Salon-de-Provence. I made my way there early and returned often, convinced that it was impossible to understand Nostredame and his cultural posterity without spending time in the man’s adopted hometown. But there was something else. It is easy for Springfield, Illinois, to take pride in its Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum or for Menlo Park, New Jersey, to devote an educational center to Thomas Edison, the inventor who made the town famous. Things might be more complicated when the local son in question is a notorious figure whom the outside world shapes as it sees fit. If I was drawn to Salon, it was because this middling town could not elude national or international forces that tend to flatten everything out. I wanted to find out how things played out in the city to which Nostredame had linked his name in such a public fashion, without asking permission.
All kinds of people agreed to answer my questions: local activists and artists, office workers and policemen, journalists and deputy mayors. None, however, conveyed the town’s singular position with greater verve than Françoise Wyss-Mercier, an energetic fifty-something woman who helped put Nostradamus—or rather a particular vision of Nostradamus—on the local map in the 1980s and then again in 1999. Wyss-Mercier began doing so as a young freelance journalist and a member of Salon’s cultural commission, a semipublic agency that had been set up to energize the local cultural scene. With Nostradamus all over the news, Jean-Charles de Fontbrune now made frequent stops in Salon to promote his book. He even invited the town to become the world’s leading research center on the Prophecies. Wyss-Mercier was not against the idea, but she could not bank on much local support. Growing up in Salon, she had heard repeatedly that townspeople paid little attention to the man. She also knew that the local authorities had failed to preserve Nostradamus’s memory since the French Revolution.1
The town’s archives enabled me to fill in the story. During the nineteenth century, Salon did little besides naming a street after Nostradamus in 1808. The city did not concern itself with to his tomb and his original home—“nothing interesting,” said the mayor in 1818. The three hundredth anniversary of his death passed unnoticed in 1866. Nostredame did secure a statue that year, but it was only because a local artist donated it to the city. While some residents may well have venerated the tomb (as some visitors claimed), I have uncovered no traces of such rituals or oral traditions. The nonheroic astrologer who had entertained a difficult relationship with some locals had failed to anchor himself in Salon’s memory. Other factors came into play as well, including the meager cultural resources of small provincial towns. Provence’s regionalist writers, the Félibres, also dismissed a man who had said little about the region’s spiritual poetry and had written in French rather than the Occitan dialects spoken in southern France. By the end of the century, Salon was furthermore defining itself as modern and forward-looking. The arrival of the railroad had enabled the town to become a leading exporter of olive oil, soap, and roasted coffee. New factories produced metal drums, barrels, and soap boxes. Banks opened agencies; workers flocked from Italy and Spain. The heart of the town moved from the old quarter surrounding the castle, the neighborhood in which Nostredame had made his home, toward the train stations and the surrounding boulevards, where Salon’s new business leaders now built gaudy villas. These entrepreneurs attributed the town’s prosperity to its dogged, industrious character.2
If a local personage could embody these qualities, it was the engineer Adam de Craponne, whose canal had irrigated the city and its surrounding plain during the Renaissance. The enterprising and optimistic engineer was an ideal local hero for modern times. In the late nineteenth century, Salon erected his statue and gave his name to a boulevard, a musical society, and an agricultural syndicate. When a local newspaper asked its readers to elect the city’s greatest historical figure in 1949, Craponne beat Nostredame by more than a thousand votes. Salon, the newspaper concluded, preferred “engineers to shifty types” (les ingénieurs aux ingénieux). Nostredame was the anti-Craponne personified: notorious rather than glorious, enthused with astrology rather than science, concerned with personal success rather than the public good, gloomy rather than optimistic. Local politicians, industrialists, clergymen, and intellectuals refused to turn the wizard into a symbol of their town. They preferred a great man who had a local resonance but no purchase whatsoever outside Salon. Not even the prophetic revival that took place during World War II could spark local interest in Nostradamus.3
This line prevailed during much of the twentieth century. Salon went through rough times between the 1920s and the 1940s, when the market for olive oil dried up and the nearby port of Marseille siphoned off business. Following World War II, however, the city took advantage of large-scale industrial ventures in Provence to reinvent itself. The mayor who ran Salon from the 1950s to the 1980s, Jean Francou, was convinced that the region’s new dam and petrochemical plants would attract investments and white-collar residents. Salon could become a commercial center and a middle-class bedroom community, prized for its quality of life. As the population doubled, the municipality built waterworks, hospitals, schools, and stadiums. Like other Christian Democrats, Mayor Francou believed in social services as a means of outreach and political patronage. He also took aim at Salon’s squalid medieval quarter, now inhabited by poor families and North African immigrants, most of whom lacked running water and electricity. A modern city could not let this stand. The authorities launched an urban renewal plan that would destroy much of the neighborhood, erect cubelike buildings, and transfer residents to housing projects on the town’s outskirts. Only at the behest of the national heritage agency did Francou agree to protect a dozen medieval houses and highlight Nostredame’s home.4
By then, the building was in shambles. Henry Miller was horrified when he came through Salon in 1964. “What’s the reason behind that neglect?” he wrote the photographer Brassaï, a friend of his. “The most illustrious person in all of France!” The house told visitors all that they had to know about Nostradamus’s place in Salon. Between the wars, local historians and tourism officials had occasionally made room for him. When the town struggled to project itself economically into the future, the past beckoned as a bewitching dreamscape, a picturesque Old France that might seduce visitors. This was still true in the 1950s. “Salon the tourist center can be represented by Nostradamus,” a local hotel owner declared in 1954. The prophet’s name now appeared on road signs and a marketing slogan, Salon, City of Nostradamus. But these steps remained timid. The Salonais derived few local benefits from linking their name to someone who was both familiar and estranged from regional traditions. It was difficult to perpetuate a mystery around Nostradamus—or to convince compatriots to suspend disbelief. More to the point, the forward-looking mayor and most residents had little interest in culture, tourism, astrology, and dusty Provençal folklore. In our “century of speed and comfort,” explained a local journalist in 1960, “things of the mind are secondary.” The prophet had little traction, except perhaps as a counterpart to modernity. When it came time to name the middle school that had been built on the ruins of the medieval quarter in the 1960s, Craponne was the obvious choice.5
And then everything changed. The oil crisis hit Provence hard in the mid-1970s and dimmed Salon’s prospects. The town’s dependence on services meant that fiscal returns could no longer fund its generous social programs. As elsewhere, unemployment exacerbated xenophobic and anti-immigrant sentiments. Journalists and politicians worried that Salon’s North African population refused to embrace French culture. Some residents complained that immigrants had turned the old quarter (whose renovation had run out of funding) into what they called a “kasbah.” These immigrants’ delinquent children, they said, now descended from their housing projects to “impose their rule on the city of Nostradamus.” A public-health issue in years past, the decay of the city center had come to symbolize social decomposition, crime, and loss of identity. Salon “is no longer what it once was,” regretted one local editorial. By 1984, France’s extreme-right party, the National Front, was winning more than 20 percent of the votes in local elections. During a national referendum held a few years later, just over half Salon’s population voted against the treaty on European unification. Such results reflect vulnerability, a yearning for protection, and unease regarding a future that, in this town, seemed once again to be local rather than regional.6
City Hall accordingly charted a new course. Urban renewal and heritage would now supplant growth. The goal was to improve the city’s image, draw tourists, and unite residents around a shared past and moral values. The better local residents knew their traditions, the more they would love the town and respect one another. So began the “reconquest” of the old quarter, with faux-Mediterranean buildings and pedestrian streets, food markets and folklore festivals. The decision to turn Salon’s past and city center into historical make-believe exemplifies the way European cities were transforming the past into a resource that would advance modernist agendas. It also tapped the population’s desire to shelter the environment and local culture from pollution, developers, and a mass-market culture that the French often associate with the United States. Wyss-Mercier called upon Salon to protect authentic local traditions against the American cultural tsunami. European public festivities, she wrote in the local newspaper in 1985, are increasingly modeled after American entertainment, with its twirlers, boxing matches, and hot dogs. When I met her years later, she still professed her love for the endangered terroir—a word that could be translated as soil but really denotes a sense of place.7
What about Nostradamus, now back in the global spotlight? Could Salon succeed without the help of the prophet who was garnering attention across the planet? This was the question in the 1980s, and in 1999 as well. Mayor Francou was skeptical, but one of his deputies convinced him that this extraordinary figure could hasten the town’s renewal. First came Nostredame’s home, still in shoddy condition and open to visitors only at select times. At the deputy’s instigation, City Hall acquired the entire building, began renovations, and turned it into a four-room museum. Budgetary constraints kept it modest but a new mayor entertained loftier aspirations in the early 1990s. He entered into a partnership with the Maison Grévin, whose famous wax museum has delighted visitors in Paris since the nineteenth century. The Maison Nostradamus, as it was called, tells the astrologer’s life story in ten tableaus. Nostredame invites visitors into his home, where each room is filled with wax figures, sound effects, and light shows. “Everything has been planned to allow spectators to live and feel history,” explained the new team.8
In the early 1980s, Wyss-Mercier felt likewise that Nostradamus’s time had come in Salon. Things were so bleak, she wrote Francou in a memo, that people were looking for some kind of utopian ideal. After pondering the matter, she concluded that Nostradamus could fulfill social needs and provide an economic bonanza in ways that Craponne could not. The phenomenon would allow Salon to attract huge crowds. It was a sure thing. Soon enough, a local alliance took form around this project. Some of the people involved—journalists, tourism officials, and local erudites—had been around for a long time. Others belonged to new business, neighborhood, and cultural organizations and shared Wyss-Mercier’s enthusiasm for cultural marketing. Thanks to these local providers, Nostradamus appeared in exhibitions, comic books, outdoor frescoes, and guided walks for tourists. From 1986 on, the town’s summer pageants also revolved around him.9
But what Nostradamus would it be? The astrologer or the seer? The humanist poet or the consigliore? Unless, of course, the prophet of doom imposed his will. Salon initially tapped Fontbrune and his unmatched media connections, but few townspeople were ready to live in what Paris-Match called the “Mecca of the occult.” Wyss-Mercier and her partners asked Fontbrune to focus on Nostredame’s life and his encounter with Catherine de Médicis during her visit to Salon. He agreed, but this partnership lasted less than two years. Salon then resolved to recover Nostredame the “super-genius”: a devout yet free-thinking Renaissance man who had combined prescience and science, scanned his times and the souls of his compatriots with piercing clarity, spoken the major ancient and modern languages, and recognized the genius of Craponne. His resourcefulness and openness to others, his affinity for tradition and new ventures, and his “cultural versatility” (as the press kit put it) were exactly what Salon needed to overcome the present crisis. Nostradamus had put Salon on the map. If the Salonais pitched in and worked together, they could do the same. A new Renaissance awaited.10
The organizers of the historical pageant put this into action. Each year since the mid-1980s, hundreds of volunteers from all social classes have contributed to a reenactment of Catherine de Médicis’s visit (or sometimes another historical scene). They have sewn costumes, built sets, and played peasants or innkeepers in the Renaissance village that has been set up in the old city center. Prophecy and predictions have remained in the background, even in 1999, which the organizers deemed the “Nostradamian year par excellence,” when they faded behind the history of a Renaissance man and a town that had welcomed Catherine. The festival blended a do-it-yourself Renaissance fair, cultural marketing, and grassroots neighborhood activism. Many participants appreciated this opportunity to fashion a new social identity, feel deep ties of camaraderie, and recast their relationship with the town. This, at any rate, is how they described it to journalists and to me as well when I interviewed them. “We were in the city, we owned the city, the public space,” a pharmacist from the housing project explained. “We set up our shacks, our taverns. All of this was ours. In some ways, afterward, you don’t see your city the same way.” Nostradamus, too, contributed to the reconquest of Salon.11
* * *
As I listened to Wyss-Mercier talk about these festivals, I could not help but draw a parallel with the resurgence of astrology and the occult that was taking place at the same time. The two are not identical: whereas astrologers promise to disclose underlying patterns on their own, the town’s cultural endeavors rested on a mix of private initiative, public planning, and shared undertaking. But the astrologer and the Renaissance man emerged around the same time to provide fodder for dreams—“dreams of a future drawn in the stars,” the pageant organizers said—and deepen the connection with the everyday world. Both feed yearnings for a deeper sense of self, for intuition of larger forces, and perhaps for what a local volunteer called a soul. Besides the city, it is also oneself and one’s place in the world that one sees differently afterward. This overlap goes a long way toward explaining why at this precise moment Nostradamus reentered Salon’s public space and collective life for the first time since the early modern age.12
This happened during an era that was losing confidence in grand historical narratives and vast theories about the state, society, or the human condition. This confidence, too, may be seen as a casualty of the West’s crisis of authority. The same holds for the future, which is difficult to imagine as a collective horizon—of progress, revolution, or restoration of the past—when change is spiraling out of control and one worries about the next unemployment check. The future has come to loom as alarmingly impenetrable, severed from a history that can no longer provide guarantees or shared models of behavior. We are thus left with local stories and an ephemeral present that stockpiles memories of a mysterious and indeterminate past.13
It is clearly not because residents believed that predictions would now come true that Nostradamus acquired a new presence in Salon. Rather, this inherently local venture promised to slow time down and to stretch it out. When Wyss-Mercier said that Provence could save itself only by recovering its traditions, she did not simply embrace a nostalgia-tinged, immobile past. Instead, she and others responded to contemporary anxieties by trying to reconnect past and future. “Nostradamus jostles temporality and draws Salon and its residents into a great transmutation,” explained one festival program. I cannot vouch that the organizers deliberately sought to recover Nostredame’s own plays among past, present, and future, but they did speak of time reversing itself, of time growing active and transcendent. In 1999, they promised to link the sixteenth century with the third millennium. In that year’s festival, the character of Nostredame describes himself as a tree, with roots that sink deep within the terroir and branches that reach into the skies. He points toward a collective transformation of time and a future that is rooted, regulated, orderly, and also full of possibilities.14
These local aspirations could speak to people within and outside Salon. It is partly for this reason that the pageants energized local residents and drew up to eighty thousand spectators. But ultimately they did not speak loud enough. Part of the problem is that Nostredame has not left a cultural legacy, a moral foundation, or an image of the community around which Salon’s residents could fashion a proud collective project. The other problem is that the web of meaning surrounding Nostradamus has grown too dense. Many of the townspeople to whom I spoke explained that they knew little about the man and did not care to learn more. A seventy-something woman captured the prevailing indifference at an open-air market. It might serve Salon to recover its Renaissance prophet in order to draw visitors, she said, but “we don’t know who Nostradamus is. We know where he lived, we know what he did, that’s it. We don’t believe in it.” Others were more vocal. Enough already of Nostradamus! said the young woman who cut my hair one afternoon in a small salon on the city’s main street. During the festivals, many participants gravitated not to the man but to “the times of Nostradamus,” a place and a moment out of time in which they could reinvent themselves and escape the constraints of their daily lives. One volunteer, an ex-policeman, explained that he had relished the direct connection with history and the feeling of freedom. But he eventually grew tired of hearing about Nostradamus: “People were saying so many things about him.”15
In the right circumstances, small towns or local movements can provide the broader world with objects of devotion or collective memory. For this to happen, they must embrace modern commerce, rise above parochialism, and speak to widely shared aspirations. This is what Chicago’s Claretians did in the 1930s when they launched a national cult around the all-but-unknown St. Jude. Their medallions and rosary rings spread the image of a placeless saint that was available to all. Salon, however, has played it safe commercially to avoid becoming what one official called the Lourdes of fortune-telling. Its leaders and its residents were equally concerned about what the prophet’s presence in Salon said about them. Unlike broader media forces, unlike those Nostradamian providers who reshaped the phenomenon in ways that they deemed meaningful or profitable, Salon has anchored Nostradamus in the local past to protect its own reputation. As the deputy mayor put it, the city sought to “flesh him out so that people could see past the antediluvian wizard.” Only by explaining precisely who Michel de Nostredame was and who he was not could Wyss-Mercier and others make him palatable.16
These local actors are no match, however, for this antediluvian wizard, bathed as he now is in global anxieties and commercial ambitions. In the late 1990s, festival organizers denounced both the Aum sect and what they called “the business of fear.” The director of the Maison Nostradamus likewise told a newspaper that predictions about the end of the world in 2000 were unconscionable: “Less than scrupulous interpreters are enabling potential lunatics to cultivate their madness.” Outside the town, the quatrains continue to float in the ether while ominous interpretations hog the attention. Few people can picture the Renaissance man. As a result, this wizard has become the absent center in Salon. Outsiders search for him in vain while local residents cannot escape him. The Japanese television crews that descended upon Salon in the 1990s asked the man who played Nostredame to predict the end of the world for their cameras. Whether he accepted or not to do so, the request displays the chasm that separates Salon from the rest of the world.17
A century earlier, Salon’s local historian had declared that Nostradamus was “as linked to the city as Muhammad is to Mecca.” Unlike its Muslim counterpart, Salon’s prophet has never been just a prophet; he could neither secure local consensus nor draw pilgrims. And yet he has never gone away. This is why the local sphere has proved a shaky foundation for his modern posterity. This is why in Provence as elsewhere, Nostradamus continues to eschew collective moorings. And this is why Salon has joined the long list of institutions and social groups that have kept Nostradamus at bay over the centuries. Not even Nostredame’s hometown is powerful enough to halt the tides of history.18
* * *
As this book neared completion, it dawned on me that something else had drawn me to Salon. Here was a place, the only one perhaps, in which the rational historian in me (or at least the person who saw himself as such) could approach Nostradamus and ponder the phenomenon’s lasting presence without coming too close to the magical thinking, the apocalyptic doom, and the collective fears that had entered my life in the 1980s and proved so disturbing. Salon was safe. Wyss-Mercier herself had said so to the LondonTimes in 1999: “We don’t get too worked up about anything in these parts.” Though I did not frame it this way at the time, I, too, wanted to delve into the Nostradamian world without getting worked up—about the fate of the world or passions that might lurk within me. Like residents of Salon and so many others before them, I wanted to peek in while keeping a distance.19
This proved more difficult than I had expected. At one point, I asked a leading French commentator of Nostradamus for permission to read his fan mail (for reasons of confidentiality, I will not reveal his name). This seemed like an ideal way of understanding what a cross-section of the population makes of these predictions in our times. Following an initial e-mail exchange, he invited me to his home in central France. I made plans to visit the following week, after giving a talk in Paris. Everything was set, but a day later, his tone suddenly cooled. He now complained that people had repeatedly taken advantage of his scholarship. I tried to reassure him, but on the third day he informed me that his private papers were his alone. He then rescinded his invitation: “Sorry to disappoint you, but I will retain for myself a phenomenon that is my exclusive possession.” I asked him to reconsider, but to no avail. Googling my name, he had discovered that it was at the Sorbonne that I would be speaking. That university, he wrote me on the fourth day, was the home of his greatest enemies. How could I have kept this from him?
That evening, he sent me yet another message. After accusing the Sorbonne of blackballing him for years, he lambasted the scholars who were intruding on his turf: “Not a single one among you knows the first thing about Nostradamus. And all of you spread inanities about him.” One part of me understood the episode as a predictably testy encounter between two bodies of knowledge, one of them academic and the other one amateurish (in the descriptive sense of the word) or stigmatized. But I was also shaken by this scorching exchange with a live Nostradamian provider and by the high emotions that continue to surround the phenomenon. I never replied to his last e-mail.20
It was harder to make a break when tragedy struck within my home. I would not draw the reader into the vicissitudes of my personal life if this book had not been written under the shadow of a loss that hangs over every one of its pages. A few years ago, my family was involved in a rafting accident in which our younger son drowned. It happened in minutes—a boy snatched away deep in a canyon, twenty-four hours of numbness, and then the sudden awareness that sucks out the air.
I made my way to my office two weeks after the funeral. Back to Nostradamus. There was nothing else to do. But I did not bury my grief in work. It did not seem possible or advisable to muffle discordant sounds and retreat to a monastic abode in which repeated activity steadies the days, leaving only the nights unprotected. Minutes were now laden with the weight of years while months elapsed in what seemed like seconds. The outside world looked pretty much the same, and yet everything had changed. The foundation that had seemed so sturdy weeks earlier had cracked, along with reason and justice, visions of our son’s future and our own as well, and even the possibility of moral order. As the boundaries that used to organize our lives collapsed, it became impossible to separate the personal and the professional. I attended a lecture in which a psychiatrist spoke about trauma and wondered whether I was there for research purposes or for myself. During the day, I read about people who engaged in magical thinking, others who debunked it, and psychological theories about the whole matter. In the evening, my wife and friends shared stories about signs of our son’s presence: the sudden breeze during the funeral, the rabbit that came onto our lawn and allowed us to approach, the miniature rainbow around a sapling, and heart-shaped rocks—lots of those. My wife saw these signs, I did not, but everything seemed to blend together.
One evening, thunder resounded at the exact moment that I opened the front door. Freak storms are common in the Catskills during the summer, so I did not pay attention. But I sprained my ankle the following day and strange thoughts began to billow in my head as I lay on a couch with an ice pack. They brought me back to the aftermath of the accident, when a massive storm broke out while we searched for our son on the banks of the Green River in Utah. Someone is angry, a voice inside me said, a voice that I barely recognized but whose force I could not deny. During the following months, other injuries and ailments followed. It is easy now to recognize not post-traumatic stress disorder exactly but trauma lodging itself in the body. Whatever I understood then was too inchoate to silence the notion that Nostradamus was trying to stop or punish me. While the left side of my brain worked fine, it could not prevent this specter from burrowing itself in my psyche. I told myself that these were mind games; I did not have to play along. But on some days I ended up arguing it out against myself. Why would Nostredame come after me and prevent the completion of a book that seeks to understand the man and his posterity?
It was the strangest thing. Was I incurably superstitious? Had I succumbed to irrational fears? It took me a long time to go beyond such questions and their all-too-familiar frame and acknowledge that, not unlike Samuel Pepys after the Fire of London and others over the centuries, a part of me remained intrigued by the possibility of magical forces. My 1980s Nostradamus moment was no vertigo of teenage delusion. Nor was it necessarily behind me. I read at one point about an Israeli psychologist whose subjects could entertain magical thoughts, see them as irrational, and yet prove unable to push them away. It is one thing to hear about such behavior and trace the endurance of magical thinking in modern times. It is something else—equally powerful, though in a different way—to think these thoughts and encounter what we call Nostradamus in such close quarters.21
The boundary between my own self and the broader world was the last to go. The edge person Nostredame, the ambivalences of our late modernity, and my inner conflicts came together in ways I could not have foreseen. My personal situation does not a pattern make, of course. But perhaps it points toward something larger, something that the writer Rebecca West voiced with terse eloquence some years ago. She was writing about Yugoslavia, but her words—comments on a time and place and on human nature—are germane. “Only part of us is sane,” she wrote. “The other half of us is nearly mad.… Neither part is commonly quite victorious, for we are divided against ourselves.” The same is true of Nostradamus, ever so divided, ever so alluring, and ever so unsettling at the dawn of the third millennium.22