Chapter 6

Wonder and Politics at the Court of France

A ghost appeared in Salon in 1696. It startled a local blacksmith and then ordered him to travel to the court of Versailles and convey a message to Louis XIV. When I stumbled upon this episode, my initial reaction was to dismiss it as trivial. But the ghost kept surfacing. I ran into it while reading letters and periodicals and other sources that made it clear that, even if one has little taste for such apparitions, the core of the story was real.

Each encounter brought out another facet of a tale that grew odder and more intriguing. The public became enthralled by the ghost and the blacksmith from Salon. Versailles opened its doors to a commoner who lacked rank, a title, or a patron—the court’s leading currencies. Louis XIV granted this unlikely visitor a private audience and reprimanded courtiers who questioned the man’s mental balance. Nostredame’s relationship to the whole matter remained mysterious. Some accounts claimed that it was his ghost that had returned, others that he had predicted the visit in a quatrain. Regardless, no other episode put Nostradamus as squarely in the public eye at the turn of the eighteenth century.¹

Anthropologists and historians have long understood that the most impenetrable features of distant cultures can provide rich entry points into ways of thinking that are radically different from our own. Something was clearly going on in Salon and Versailles, something that might explain why men and women from all reaches of society continued to deem Nostradamus meaningful 150 years after his death. The Nostradamian providers played their part, but they did not do it all. Nostradamus was also an object of wonder and a component of a political culture that ranged from high aristocratic circles to popular pamphlets. Its political legitimacy in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is difficult to comprehend today. But this episode also marked a moment of change. What some deemed admissible in terms of public behavior and politics, others now found unseemly. This, too, I came to realize, makes the episode revealing. The ghost traveled between worlds in more ways than one.

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It began as follows. The middle-aged blacksmith François Michel was leading a quiet life in Salon, which remained as tranquil and prosperous as in the Renaissance. A plague epidemic would devastate the region in 1720, but at this time olive groves, orchards, sheep farms, and tanneries sustained Salon’s five thousand residents. While Nostredame had few living relatives in town—one traveler spoke of two nieces in 1671—his tomb continued to attract visitors. Whether local residents paid their respects to the prophet is an open question. Whatever personal or collective devotions they engaged in have left no traces in the archives. There is no doubt, however, that this devout town took pride in its collegial church and its stagings of martyrdom scenes. Oratorian monks taught school, and it is probably from them that the blacksmith had learned to write French. A pious man, he lived near the Capuchin convent and belonged to the Pénitents blancs, a Catholic confraternity devoted to prayer and charity. Contemporary accounts describe him as tall, robust, and reserved.²

They also concur that the ghost appeared in December 1696, around the Feast of the Immaculate Conception. It happened in the evening, under a full moon. Some claim that the blacksmith was tilling his parcel of land. Others relate that a voice summoned him to an isolated chapel. Out of nowhere, the ghost grabbed the man’s shoulders and instructed him to relay a secret message to Louis XIV. The blacksmith was so shaken that he reportedly spent a week in bed, hoping that the ghost would relent. But the specter returned twice, growing more threatening each time. Michel eventually gave in. Following the ghost’s orders, he asked the king’s representative in Provence—the intendant—for an invitation to the court. The official had doubts. Catholic orthodoxy governed France at this time. The king had recently expelled Protestants and now faced a surge of popular prophecy in some regions. Visionaries could sow trouble; calls for repentance could lead to resistance or open rebellion. The intendant thus requested a character check from Salon’s authorities. It came back positive, but he still deferred the matter to his superior at the court, the secretary of state. After pondering the matter, the higher official summoned the blacksmith to the palace of Versailles.

Michel set off the following February. News of the apparition had quickly traveled beyond Salon. Countless people wanted to meet the man they took for a prophet and stopped him along the road. In Lyon, crowds almost suffocated him. The blacksmith’s presence at the court heightened the excitement. It was highly unusual for such figures to circulate in this aristocratic world and unprecedented for them to meet privately with the king (nobles pined for such audiences, too). Michel’s modest station and his sex played in his favor. Female visionaries were more worrisome than their male counterparts for they could abandon Christian humility and their social role as women while making claims to spiritual authority. Still, royal doors would not have opened if the blacksmith did not have something vital to reveal. Upon arriving in Versailles, the ghost returned and told him what to say to the king. The duke de Saint-Simon, whose journal is an unparalleled source regarding life at Versailles, reported that everyone at the court pondered the matter. The secretary of state and other officials tried to pry the blacksmith’s secret. So did princes, ministers, and ladies, who spent hours in Michel’s company. None of them succeeded. By the time the king granted him an audience in April, the affair had become an international sensation. The ghost and the blacksmith made their way into journals, broadsides, engravings, and songs. One French diplomat even took time off from peace negotiations in Holland to ask a lady at the court for the latest developments.

François Michel does not seem to have mentioned Nostradamus while in Versailles, but the prophet’s name was all over the story in media and public opinion. Nostradamus is the ghost! The blacksmith and Nostredame share the same name! Michel is his descendant! In one popular song, Michel intoned that he had come from his province in the name of Nostradamus. Some members of the court began referring to Michel as Nostradamus. One marquis spoke of “this man, whom people said is the penultimate member of the race of Nostradamus.” He was quoting quatrain 2.28, which people had been linking to the episode before he reached Versailles:

Who could this wanderer be if not the prophet from Provence? Some commentators read Dial in the second line as a reference to Diana, goddess of the hunt and the moon. This was the name of Michel’s mother, they explained, and she was a distant relative of Nostredame. A chapbook coupled a song on the affair with two portents from his 1555 almanac. As the episode unfolded, the diplomat in Holland, the lady at the court, and others discussed the meanings of various quatrains. Outside these rarefied circles, too, people linked the ghost and the blacksmith to Nostradamus. But few did so with certainty, few had a clear sense of whose ghost this was, and absolutely no one besides the king knew what message François Michel had relayed from the netherworld. And that more than anything is what contemporaries yearned to find out.³

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Nostredame’s transformation into a ghost took place organically. Ghosts were a type of apparition, the souls of dead persons made visible to the living. They usually appeared in human guise, at night, and cloaked in the clothes they had worn or else the sheets in which they had been buried. While apparitions could take the form of angels or demons, ghosts intervened in worldly matters and communicated with their kin. It was commonly believed that the spirits of the dead hovered near their bodies for a month after passing. Belief in ghosts also owed much to the Catholic notion of purgatory. Trapped there until they attained the holiness necessary to enter heaven, souls would sometimes ask their descendants for help. In 1628, for example, the ghost of a chambermaid appeared before her niece in Dole, a city in the province of Franche-Comté, toward the east of France. After confessing her sins, the ghost implored the young woman to complete the three pilgrimages that she had neglected to undertake in her lifetime. By doing so, said the ghost, the niece would alleviate the pain of a poor soul who had already spent seventeen years in purgatory. In return, the ghost baptized the niece’s unborn child and showed her a path to salvation.⁴

A powerful, merciful God could also send ghosts to repair injustice and moral infractions. Ghosts haunted inveterate sinners, enforced obligations toward ancestors, and warned of looming dangers. This does not mean that such apparitions had to be taken at face value. The devil could manipulate the senses while imagination could generate illusions. Protestant theologians furthermore denounced ghosts and the purgatory as Catholic superstitions. Since souls had been predestined for heaven or hell, God had no reason to allow them to return. Despite such misgivings, belief in ghosts endured within wide swathes of Christendom, a tangible connection to the afterlife for people who did not necessarily believe in saints or angels.

Ghosts were thus interstitial creatures who harbored divine as well as human qualities and circulated between the living and the departed, between past and future. It is no surprise that Nostradamus should have joined their ranks. The mysterious man who never revealed his true intents seemed to couple human attributes and paranormal powers while looking backward as well as forward in time. In 1634, the illustrious Spanish poet Francisco de Quevedo had portrayed Nostradamus as a ghostlike figure who denounced an era in which money trumped justice and holiness. Fifteen years later, a French chapbook related that Louis XIII’s widow Anne of Austria had encountered a specter while reading the Prophecies. Elsewhere, writers depicted Nostredame as a visionary who discerned what remained invisible to ordinary people. In the Astrological Visions of Michel Nostradamus (1649), for instance, his disarticulated voice revealed the hidden workings of current affairs. The ghostly visit of Salon hence points toward a broader fascination—mixing curiosity and dread—with the afterlife and those supernatural forces that suffused the material world. That Nostradamus captured both sides of the encounter, that he came across as both ghost and clairvoyant, made perfect sense. It was commonly believed, moreover, that ghosts haunted the locality in which they had lived their lives. They infused it with their presence while tapping its distinctive spirit, the genius loci. The specter that startled the blacksmith would thus have come from Salon. Who else could it be besides the famous Nostradamus?⁵

This does not mean that Louis XIV necessarily perceived this ghost as Nostredame’s, or even that he believed in the existence of ghosts. But it is possible that he approached the episode with the kind of wonderment that had surrounded Nostradamus since the Renaissance. The Middle Ages had bequeathed a notion of wonder understood as awe and stupefaction before comets, eclipses, deformed animals, and apparitions. At once novel, strange, and rare, these occurrences lacked natural causes and obvious explanations. And they mattered, especially if they coincided with human events such as wars, because they pointed toward deeper meanings and hidden forces that cut across cultural or moral boundaries. These occurrences could thus be seen as portents regarding political or apocalyptic events: a plague, an invasion, a victory, or even the coming of the Messiah.⁶

By the late seventeenth century, learned people were increasingly leaving wonder and portents to what they called the vulgar. They now collected ostrich eggs or investigated earthquakes as strange, unnatural events that resulted from chance meetings of natural causes. Still, wonder maintained a purchase during an age of religious crises, protracted conflicts, and civil wars. Publishers and booksellers continued to find it enticing and commercially promising. Pamphlets, broadsides, chapbooks, and even learned journals promised their readers accounts of events that were “remarkable,” “unusual,” “extraordinary,” or “strange and certain.” A Declaration of a Strange and Wonderful Monster, about a headless creature from Lancashire, was typical. Wonder still furnished a grid through which countless Europeans made sense of the cosmos and the odd, unpredictable occurrences that shaped their world. At the very least, it was a way of pondering such questions.⁷

With his prophecies, omens, and monstrous ubiquity, Nostradamus was perfectly at home in this world. Had the astrologer not promised to furnish “numerous wonders” in his almanacs? Chavigny had agreed: his marvelous predictions filled the world with awe and admiration, he said. Successive Nostradamian providers likewise invited readers to behold unparalleled words that unveiled past and future designs. Prior to the ghost’s apparition, English interpretations of the quatrains foretold “many strange and wonderful things” for England, France, and Ireland. Chapbooks and broadsides invoked quatrains while describing the sudden appearance of a new island, a devastating flood, or some other portentous event. How strange and wondrous that things had come to pass as Nostradamus had predicted! In 1668, a French placard recounted a spectacular battle between massive squadrons of birds above the city of Dole. Partridges and owls fought it out for hours against a dark sky. Twenty thousand perished. A woodcut depicted farmers and fishermen collecting carcasses as the mêlée raged. The accompanying text urged readers to ponder this astonishing event and draw the requisite moral lesson. It then established its credentials as an omen by quoting lines from quatrain 1.100:

So many people were still sending her this prophecy a decade later that Madame de Sévigné, the renowned aristocrat, wrote her daughter about it. The combination of startling incident and evocative quatrain continued to amaze. Nostradamus made events such as this one yet more wondrous and astounding and authoritative. They overflowed with meaning.⁸

That is what happened in the 1690s when courtiers and ordinary folk discussed the strange François Michel and Nostradamus’s predictions, when chapbooks portrayed the ghost as an omen and his message as “something extraordinary,” and possibly when the king received this Provençal visitor. Astonishment, amazement, uncertainty, and (sometimes) dread surrounded a series of events and a quatrain that, as one song put it, told a wondrous tale about the terrestrial and cosmic worlds. If the episode became a sensation, if the Nostradamus phenomenon continued to resonate as widely as it did, it was in no small part because it both channeled and generated feelings of wonder.⁹

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But this was only part of it. From the court to coffeehouses and marketplaces, politics surfaced everywhere in seventeenth-century Europe. People discussed the destiny of monarchs, the fate of dynastic successions, the makeup of alliances, and the outcome of wars. In some circles, these conversations could revolve around abstract questions of sovereignty, rights, or religious freedom, but they rarely bypassed a pressing matter: the affairs of France. With the largest population in Europe after Russia, rich agricultural resources, a strategic location, and the ambitious Louis XIV on the throne from 1643 until 1715, the country dominated continental politics. Whether or not we call it absolutist, the divine French monarchy asserted itself in unprecedented ways. It expanded and modernized its army and bureaucracy, turned royal councils into centers of decision making, and intervened more forcefully in the economy. It also defanged many aristocrats by immersing them in the codified, etiquette-heavy, hierarchical court of Versailles. Military victories and annexations further enhanced the country’s size and prestige.

By the end of the century, however, Louis XIV found himself on the defensive. After expelling Protestants from France in 1685, he sought to guarantee his borders and national security. The result was the Nine Years War (1688–1697), a conflict that pitted France against England, the Dutch Netherlands, Hapsburg Austria, and other members of the League of Augsburg. Across the Channel, partisans of the new Protestant King William III despised a French monarch who deemed his power universal, sought religious uniformity, threatened the English economy by abusing tariffs and trade barriers, and backed the Stuarts in their efforts to reclaim the throne of England. Louis XIV had even welcomed Catholic King James II, who had been chased out of England during the Glorious Revolution in 1688, and allowed him to organize a court in exile at the Château of Saint-Germain-en-Laye. Louis obtained early victories in the Nine Years War, but he soon found himself fighting on multiple military fronts. Enemy armies won several battles, bombarded French ports, and threatened invasion. This war of attrition took up nearly three-quarters of the country’s public revenue. Faced with massive debt and a famine that killed a tenth of the French population, Louis tabled large campaigns and explored terms of peace. The ghost thus appeared in Salon at the end of a war whose outcome was both decisive and uncertain. This is the backdrop against which every apparition or omen was now examined in France.¹⁰

There were other reasons why contemporaries would have assumed that this episode carried political overtones. For one, royal audiences were nothing if not political rituals. Furthermore, apparitions often conveyed political messages. Ghosts were known to issue divine warnings about assassination attempts and the like. It was also common for playwrights and polemicists to broadcast political views through ghosts or imaginary dialogues between specters. More to our point, some contemporaries did so via Nostradamus, a natural choice given that the phenomenon had never strayed far from politics since the sixteenth century. While the astrologer’s own designs had remained discreet, successive generations turned his predictions into an all-purpose political device. Every crisis brought him to the fore.

This began during the French Wars of Religion (1562–1598), when Catholics and Protestants both turned to prophecy, interpreted some quatrains, and coined others. Chavigny depicted Nostredame as a die-hard Catholic who denounced foreign plots and sects. In his view, the Prophecies confirmed an ancient myth about a divinely chosen Gallic king, a descendant of the Greeks and Romans, who would subjugate all Christian rulers, create a new empire, lead European countries on a victorious campaign against infidels (whom he would baptize by force), seize the Holy Land, and usher in a peaceful millennium that would precede the final apocalyptic battle. This Great Monarch, endowed with good fortune, strength, wisdom, and magnanimity, was Henri IV. Chavigny inaugurated a long line of Catholic apologists who have drawn from Nostradamus to extol a universal ruler who would govern a unified Christendom. Henri IV’s assassination postponed such dreams, but it drew Nostradamus deeper into politics. This was the first major event since the death of valiant Henri II in 1559 that people linked to the quatrains. A year later, a French gentleman contended that Nostredame had predicted Protestant decadence, Jesuit resurgence, and enduring strength for the kingdom. France was not resuming its civil war, but Nostradamus retained its political appeal.¹¹

This allure endured three decades later when Henri’s successor, Louis XIII, died of natural causes. With the child Louis XIV too young to rule, Anne of Austria and her chief minister, Cardinal Mazarin, governed France. These were tumultuous years, marked by peasant revolts, tax riots, and aristocratic attempts to bolster their prerogatives. Tensions culminated with the Fronde, a series of rebellious movements led by French judges and discontented princes who objected to the monarchy’s heavy hand. Around 1650, France was submerged by pamphlets on such issues as taxation and representative institutions. Many of these mazarinades (so named because they denounced Mazarin) took the form of horoscopes and prophecies. Nostradamus surfaced in at least sixty. His quatrains, it was said, announced an ominous fate for the “unfit cardinal” who had plunged France into turmoil. Some warned readers that Paris would be destroyed unless they followed Nostredame’s injunctions, reformed their ways, and made the right political choice. Others found in his predictions a reassuring portrayal of universal peace and fair taxation following Mazarin’s demise. Twenty-five editions of the Prophecies came out between 1644 and 1650, some of them containing two new quatrains against the “Sicilian Nizaram” (an anagram of Mazarin) who would drown in the mire of civil war:

The first line referred to the pontificate of Pope Innocent X, the others to Mazarin’s demise following the war that he had caused.¹²

Political upheaval brought out Nostradamus in Britain as well. Events followed in dramatic succession: civil war between monarchists and parliamentarians, the beheading of King Charles I outside Whitehall in 1649 and the establishment of the Commonwealth of England, war against the Dutch in 1652, and the Protectorate under Oliver Cromwell. More than half a million people died between 1638 and 1652. All of this boosted prophetic traditions that had flourished in Protestant countries since the Reformation. Britain’s advent as a leading power, coming as it did after the Thirty Years’ War and uprisings on the continent, seemed to confirm a pre-apocalyptic shift, the imminent defeat of the Catholic Antichrist, and a thousand-year kingdom of peace. Such millenarian expectations had been heightened earlier in the century by the Rosicrucians, a purported secret society whose members called for universal reformation and promised to reveal secrets in their manifestos. Levellers, Diggers, Anabaptists, Ranters, and still others awaited the final denouement. “These are days of shaking,” said one preacher, “and this shaking is universal.”¹³

Monarchists and parliamentarians now collected, interpreted, rewrote, and published biblical and nonbiblical prophecies. They turned to the book of Revelation, the book of Daniel, and prophecies attributed to two lay figures who may or may not have existed in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries: the Yorkshire soothsayer Mother Shipton and Robert Nixon, an idiot plowman from Cheshire. People also consulted Nostradamus. The famed astrologer William Lilly, who sided with parliament and predicted that kings would never again rule England, found signs as well as justification of Charles I’s beheading while parsing the Prophecies. “The senate of London its king shall slay”: this line from quatrain 9.49 was closely read in the wake of the king’s death. A mysterious Merlin Ambrosius invoked it in 1651 while denouncing the Fifth Monarchists, a group that expected Jesus or a king from Scotland to establish a new millennial kingdom. This did not stop the Fifth Monarchist preacher John Rogers from summoning Nostradamus in his own account of universal history. Quatrain 5.99—“When an old Britannic chief shall rule Rome”—announced the English occupation of Rome and the city’s reformation. The prophet from Salon provided all parties with rhetorical ammunition.¹⁴

Nostradamus resonated when the foundations of legitimate rule and the contours of political community escaped consensus. Other soothsayers inhabited the political realm, but Nostradamus made it so easy for moderates as well as radicals to establish their authority and puncture their opponents’, and prove that God was on their side. The quatrains were ideally suited for early modern polemics. They could summon astrology as well as prophecy, these two bridges between political and universal orders. Their language also lent itself so well to the word games, anagrams, and linguistic excess that polemicists often favored. The concealed meanings and dearth of dates practically invited contemporaries to select, adapt, and reinterpret predictions to suit the needs of the day. Pamphleteers could pick a single quatrain, or three, or a dozen, and draw upbeat or alarming accounts—whatever they preferred. These quatrains kept on yielding new meanings and yet, as Nostredame himself receded into the past, they could also appear antique and venerable. One Englishman spoke of “predictions, or prophecies of one of an ancient date.” Nostradamus had entered an ancient prophetic tradition that had long proved its political credentials. Like saints and pious hermits, the famous Renaissance prophet could play the role of august voice piece for various religious and political currents.¹⁵

His predictions were thus available as a political device within and outside France. In the 1650s, Holy Roman Emperor Leopold I received a quatrain foretelling the impending end of the Austrian house. A few decades later, a Dutch economist rejected the notion that a worldly ruler could free the Church. He added that Nostradamus had indicated that William of Orange, ruler of the Netherlands, was not the long-awaited savior. Tracing Nostradamus’s presence across the continent, or even his absence in countries like Russia, lies beyond the scope of this book. Still, his popularity in Britain shows that the quatrains led a multinational political life. This rich prophetic world had space for quatrains that included many more references to London than to Moscow. Many residents of the isles also kept abreast of continental affairs; and the country’s political life remained turbulent at the end of the century. His quatrains were invoked in the 1670s to discredit the Popish Plot, a scheme by which Catholics would supposedly depose the current government and kill King Charles II. A decade later, some believed that Nostredame had announced that a legitimate heir of Charles II would accede to the thrones of England, Scotland, Ireland, and France. And during the Glorious Revolution, he was quoted to confirm that William III, the House of Lords, and the Commons deserved to wield power.¹⁶

The quatrains led separate lives in different countries. The Fronde and the English Civil War were both national crises during which one country’s turn to Nostradamus made foreigners curious without generating equivalent uses abroad. Throughout the century, the French and the English selected different quatrains and pondered events that had more urgency at home than abroad. Of the twenty-three events discussed in a French-language edition of the Prophecies in 1667, nineteen pertained to France and four to England. A year later, the placard about the birds of Dole also seemed laden with political intent in France. Dole and Franche-Comté had passed from Hapsburg to French and back to Hapsburg hands in 1668. These were rough times for local residents. While the French destroyed enemy fortifications and emptied local coffers, the Hapsburgs overhauled the province’s institutions and governed by repression. The placard told readers that the birds represented France, conquering entire provinces under the august leadership of an invincible monarch.¹⁷

Nostradamus was so versatile, however, that rival countries could also enlist him against one another. This happened in the 1680s and 1690s, when France, Britain, and the Low Countries battled for glory as much as land and security. Nostradamus was conscripted in a war fought not only on battlefields but also through pamphlets, medals, and engravings. In England, his quatrains announced naval defeats and other terrible tidings for the cruel, bellicose French state: “Peace and plenty shall not be long praised in his [Louis XIV’s] reign … Death shall be brought” to France. In the Low Countries, French Protestant refugees marshaled quatrains to predict a fatal illness for Louis XIV and plagues for his decadent kingdom. William would crush the papists, they said. In France, Nostradamus indicated that the glorious Sun King would triumph over this impious alliance. One 1690 almanac even invoked the ghost of Nostradamus. The stern, white-clad specter warned William and his Protestant advisers that a “spectacle of horror” awaited them. Nostradamus hence contributed to political invectives as well as processes of state building and budding national identification that sometimes carried messianic tinges.¹⁸

This remained truer in France than elsewhere. An English traveler passing through Salon in 1673 visited the tomb of the “famous French Prophet, whose verses the Frenchmen esteem as oracles.” Whether or not the French population saw him as such, some English pamphleteers felt compelled to justify their affinity for this Catholic from an enemy country—this “prophet of their own.” Only in France did people dedicate interpretations of the quatrains to their dear country. Only in France, likewise, did Nostradamus fulfill yet another political role. Subjects who sought a promotion, a favor, or simply goodwill from the king or other eminent individuals commonly sang their praise in odes, anagrams, and madrigals. Some also used divination to uncover good things ahead for the persons whom they praised, or else to confirm their glory. Hyperbole was in fashion, and Nostradamus could deliver. In Rouen, an editor of the Prophecies included a sixain about a king who could expect “A triumphant reign, a fertile descendance, / An immortal glory, and honors without end.” Placing the monarchy in a providential design reinforced its sacral nature. Some subjects hoped that it would do wonders for them as well. The priest Jean Espitalier had lost his position after officiating at the wedding of a courtier and a lady for whom the king had little consideration. To get back in his good graces, he composed a Nostradamus sonnet that foresaw the king’s victory over William. Espitalier claimed that an old innkeeper from Salon had given him this sonnet thirty years earlier. In 1698, he forwarded it to Louis XIV and published it along with his “indispensable remarks to understand the thoughts of Nostradamus.” This priest, too, hoped that Nostradamus would make him indispensable once again.¹⁹

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When the ghost appeared in Salon, specters and Nostradamus were as firmly ensconced in the realm of politics as in the culture of wonder. This is why contemporaries were both awed by these events and convinced that the blacksmith was a political player. What, however, was the purpose of a mission that, as one pamphlet put it, “is thought to be ordered by Nostradamus”? Speculation ran wild.²⁰

Few contemporaries believed that Michel had warned about looming threats. Given his fragile position, Louis XIV would presumably have been more receptive to such premonitions now than in earlier decades, but no one liked to bring a monarch unhappy tidings. Only in later years did some contemporaries claim that the blacksmith had foretold the terrible week of 1712, when the king lost three members of his family. Likewise, no one suggested that Michel had spoken of the Apocalypse. Michel Nostradamus the Younger, Chavigny, and other providers had drawn Nostradamus in this direction, but this was but one strand among many at this time—not the leading one. Nostradamus did not automatically conjure up visions of world’s end. Apocalyptic language was in fact on the decline in Catholic countries. The Counterreformation had condemned it, and threats of Turkish invasions, bubonic plague, and famine waned at the end of the seventeenth century.

Might François Michel have curried a personal favor, then? This, too, was unlikely for a small-town blacksmith who, by all appearances, was both humble and selfless. But he may well have expressed veneration for the monarchy by providing useful information about future events or echoing royal propaganda. This was a prevailing view of the episode. According to one chapbook, Michel had promised the king military triumphs and favorable peace terms the following year. One of the popular songs about these events said the same thing: victory and peace, “that is assured.” According to another chapbook, the ghost had told Michel that France would be blessed with such great fortune that people would talk about it for two hundred years. No wonder that the king seemed so pleased by the audience.²¹

All of this is plausible. Michel would most likely have discussed matters relating to France and its monarchy, or perhaps the monarch alone, or perhaps his doomed enemies. To champion, reassure, encourage, and bring what an English commentator of Nostradamus called “good and joyful news”: this was the name of the game. Michel may even have gone farther and disclosed information about specific events. The duke de Saint-Simon and others were convinced that the whole thing was a conspiracy by Madame de Maintenon, the mistress whom Louis XIV had secretly wedded in 1683. To convince the king to make this marriage public, her entourage asked a Salon priest to draw the blacksmith into a field where a man covered by a sheet awaited, ready to relay God’s ire before this state of affairs. This version stretches the imagination, but anything was possible and contemporaries could not be blamed for believing this, or assuming (as some did) that the blacksmith had exposed a plot against French military operations. Visions and apparitions were often strategic interventions in political affairs, and Nostradamus could play that role as well. A few years earlier, a schemer had sent the English ambassador to the Netherlands a handwritten note to persuade him that William deserved the English Crown. It contained a spurious Nostradamus quatrain (“In glory and goodness sovereign shall shine”) and the interpretation that served his political goals.²²

The aim of this handwritten note was to act upon events, not merely to make sense of them. Such was the final, and potentially most important, political dimension of the ghost-and-blacksmith episode. Commentators parsed with care the last line of quatrain 2.28, which declared that the prophet’s descendant would “deliver a great nation from taxation.” Surely, they thought, this referred to the new taxes that the monarchy was levying to finance the Nine Years War. None proved more contentious than the capitation, a progressive poll tax that divided the French population into twenty-two classes, each of which was required to pay according to its means. The clergy soon obtained an immunity, however, and nobles never paid their full due. The rumor spread that the blacksmith had asked Louis XIV to eliminate this unjust and highly unpopular tax. (The Crown did so at the end of 1697, after the war had ended, but this suspension was temporary). Popular media connected the ghost’s message and Nostradamus’s quatrain with this explosive issue. The blacksmith, they reported, had promised that his audience would benefit the French population. Such expectations may well account for some of the fervor that surrounded Michel on his way to Versailles.²³

All of this remains murky, but the political overtones were hard to miss. Around the same time, a French satirical publication also featured the ghost of Nostredame. The quickest road to wealth nowadays, this specter explained, is to become a royal tax collector and take one’s cut of the returns. These kinds of claims alarmed officials. Throughout the seventeenth century, agents of the state had kept watch on subversive interpretations of Nostradamus. Jean-Baptiste Colbert, the official who would become controller general of finances, was convinced that opponents of the monarchy were using the quatrains to foment sedition. This was no idle threat. Urban and rural revolts were endemic, and many of them rejected new forms of taxation. Colbert responded with brute force to such uprisings. He ordered offenders to be hanged or broken at the wheel and sometimes imposed collective punishments. Communities lost their freedoms, their fairs, and even their walls and bells. Some officials had likewise burned tracts invoking Nostradamus and sentenced their authors to the gallows. This time, the lieutenant general of police forbade the publication of a pamphlet that linked the ghost story to quatrain 2.28. Ultimately, the contents of the royal audience—which neither the king nor the blacksmith ever disclosed—matters less than the ways contemporaries imagined it.²⁴

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After fulfilling the ghost’s instructions, François Michel wasted little time at the court. People stopped him as he made his way back to Provence, but he was exhausted and hurried home. No more ghosts, no more apparitions. Over the years, his wife sold the chandeliers, platters, rings, and necklaces that members of the court had given him in the hope that he would talk. The modest blacksmith died in 1726, leaving his descendants a small house, an orchard, and even some debts. Until the end, he had resisted prying questions. The wondrous mystery endured and so did the conviction that this affair, like so many others involving Nostradamus, had been political. In 1697 as in earlier decades, these confirmations and predictions remained available for all types of public and private uses, equally enticing whether one sought to buttress or, on the contrary, to contest the authorities.²⁵

And yet, there were cracks in the edifice. While Louis XIV listened to the blacksmith, the French monarchy never associated itself publicly with these visions or the quatrains. Nor did any political faction latch on to the episode. Nostradamus surfaced throughout the political realm and provided ways of contemplating and acting upon events, but as an occasional expedient, a polemical device. It lacked permanence, a label, enduring followers, theoretical underpinnings, and the sanction of leading figures. The phenomenon’s foundations—manifold dimensions, obscure words, a basis in media culture, nonexclusive affiliation—were also its weaknesses.

Legitimacy was furthermore becoming a problem. Pamphleteers would not have tapped Nostradamus if it did not seem credible and summon precedents, fame, and astrological or vatic templates. In 1670, an English agent in France had felt comfortable marshaling a quatrain to convince his secretary of state that a French peasant revolt would come to naught. “Troops regroup & legion turn about” was the key line (quatrain 4.12). But precedents hinged on fickle interpretations; fame provided a devalued political currency; and ghost stories were coming under growing scrutiny, especially in the upper reaches of society. Astrology and prophetic insights likewise seemed increasingly fanciful. After contributing to the radiance of the Sun King, astrology was losing its standing at the court. Scientific visions of a mechanistic universe punctured holes in its vast ambitions. Official edicts now targeted astrologers, sorcerers, magicians, and poisoners for their lies and plots. Soon enough, Europeans would debate what was most ridiculous: reliance on dreams, belief in apparitions, or faith in astrology? Soon enough, they would dismiss Nostradamus and the blacksmith’s vision as so many fairy tales.²⁶

The blacksmith’s visit elicited a fair share of skepticism in its own time. The philosopher Pierre Bayle complained that it rested on hearsay rather than proven facts. The poet Palamède Tronc de Coudoulet warned against the perils of deception. The French diplomat who was negotiating peace terms in Holland agreed that it was but “fodder for conversation on the vain curiosity of men, who seek in vain to discern the future.” And the Gazette of Amsterdam wondered how people could believe in Nostradamus and other such chimeras in an enlightened century. The episode thus captured a transitional moment during which men and women both accepted and dismissed astrology, ghosts, and Nostradamus—all of them part of the mainstream and yet increasingly relegated to the margins of society. The episode was at once a high point in the political history of Nostradamus and the end of a chapter. This may be the strangest thing about the whole matter.²⁷

The change was made manifest four years after the apparition. In 1701, two of Louis XIV’s grandsons made an overnight stop in Salon. The municipal authorities welcomed them in the customary fashion with a solemn procession, victory trophies, and fireworks. They also hung a banner that proclaimed, “Nostradamus to the princes, grandsons of a hero: welcome. I have known you for a hundred and fifty years.” Another banner presented six quatrains that had foreseen this visit and the main political crisis of the day: the future succession to the Spanish throne. A similar scene played out in the town of Beaucaire, thirty-fives miles to the west, when the king dispatched one of his top marshals to quash Protestant insurgents in 1704. Town elders welcomed this war hero by reciting sixain 43, which spoke of mutinies and sieges and the restoration of peace: “They will be greatly relieved, / When he shall make his entrance into Beaucaire.” Both Salon and Beaucaire marshaled Nostradamus—the man and the quatrains—to express their loyalty and seal collective relationships with the Crown. Both deemed him acceptable as a political device, a means of legitimation, and a public language of praise.²⁸

And yet, something was amiss. The marshal mocked the sixain privately as obsequious drivel. He would have said so publicly, but his diplomatic acumen prevailed. In Salon, the king’s grandsons asked neither to meet François Michel nor to visit Michel de Nostredame’s tomb. This surprised their hosts. After all, Louis XIII and Louis XIV had both paid the astrologer their respects during their visits to Salon decades earlier. This time, however, the princes moved on.