Chapter 7

Amazing Bones: A Revolutionary Desecration

A century later, in the midst of the French Revolution, visitors of a different ilk came looking for Nostradamus in Salon. They cared less about ghosts, however, than about skulls and bones.

These visitors belonged to the National Guard, a volunteer urban militia that enforced law and order and sometimes defended the nation against its enemies. In the spring of 1791, when violence escalated in the Comtat Venaissin, a papal enclave around Avignon, neighboring cities sent in guardsmen. This included a regiment from the port of Marseille, made up of artisans, shopkeepers, and some affluent citizens as well. On its way home from Avignon, the regiment halted in Salon. A few guardsmen—we do not know how many—headed at some point to the Church of Saint-François. They were neither inquiring about vespers nor saluting the dead. The National Assembly had abolished monastic orders a year earlier, and Salon had closed the church’s cemetery around the same time. No, the guardsmen were paying a visit to the town’s most famous resident.¹

Nostredame’s home was now in private hands and barely identifiable. No local families carried his name. His last descendant was a dim-witted beggar whom locals called the prophet. His crypt was accordingly the only place to feel Nostradamus’s presence. But the guardsmen spent little time pondering such connections. Instead, they broke the tomb open, exhumed the remains, and spread them across the church floor. Local residents later declared that the men were inebriated, and that one of them drank from the prophet’s skull. Some accounts held that this profane guardsman perished days later, either ensnared in an ambush, hung by rioters, or executed after stealing silverware. Tales rapidly outnumbered facts.

Nostradamus once again takes us to a strange place in history. I have long studied and taught the French Revolution and yet had never encountered this odd episode. Like the ghost story, this incident appears inconsequential at first glance and grows more intriguing the more one pays attention. Why did these men hound Nostredame more than two centuries after his death? Had his predictions not vanished or become irrelevant, along with the ghost story, as France embraced reason and progress? Why, in other words, did Nostradamus warrent attention in the midst of this most modern of revolutions?

After all, the eighteenth century witnessed the apex of the Enlightenment. According to the long-prevailing view, rational ideas percolated from the salons, cafés, and academies of Paris and London, or even Bordeaux and Manchester. Philosophical essays and encyclopedias extolled freethinking individuals who combined sensations into original ideas, bore natural rights, and could both improve themselves and better their society. This worldview sprang from the Reformation, with its ideals of industriousness and success, and the Scientific Revolution, which embraced evidence and reason to grasp and master the natural world. It then gained strength as capitalism, bureaucratic states, and scientific institutions grew more prominent. There was no need for sacral rituals and enchantment in this modern universe: no supernatural agents or magical forces, no hidden symbols for higher minds to uncover, no miracles, no awe before divine intervention in human affairs. If astrology and the like survived during the eighteenth century, it was on the fringes, in the fumes of occult subcultures, as remnants of a primitive, magical spirit that preyed upon irrational fears.²

Nostradamus was thus fated to recede as well. And certain indicators suggest that it did. In England, the name grew scarce in political pamphlets, popular literature, and fiction. In France, publishers did not release a single edition of the Prophecies between 1740 and 1772. Crises such as the Seven Years’ War (1756–1763) generated fewer interpretations of quatrains than earlier ones. It became harder to find popular print that linked these predictions to wondrous happenings. The authorities grew less suspicious of political uses of Nostradamus. Provincial censors occasionally forbade an edition of the Prophecies, out of concern with hostile interpretations, but not often. French subjects likewise devised other ways of praising their monarch. In 1716, soon after the five-year-old Louis XV had succeeded Louis XIV, a man named Belier de Saint-Brisson found confirmation of the king’s everlasting glory in one of the sixains. The phoenix, it said, would rule for a long time and with as much glory as his predecessors. This was a conventional encomium, but Belier was among the last to make such connections. When he returned to Nostradamus thirty years later, he declared that these predictions were no “erroneous fables.” Nostradamus’s declining credibility made him defensive. In 1785, a Polish count explained that the quatrains lacked any predictive value whatsoever. They merely portrayed the natural rise and fall of empires. One did not need prophetic inspiration, the count asserted, to claim that such historical events or natural catastrophes would occur.³

Still, Nostradamus neither disappeared nor became the preserve of fringe groups. New almanacs continued to provide some of his predictions. Thanks to the growing numbers of peddlers who roamed across the countryside, they also reached broader segments of the population. There are reports that in some parts of France, rural schoolchildren learned to read by reciting quatrains (this remained the case as late as 1881). Within the higher reaches of society, too, people continued to parse his words. Nostradamus was a common presence in the libraries of leading French nobles and ubiquitous in those of rural squires, along with works of piety and heraldry and chivalrous romances. Half of the monastic and abbatial libraries in Champagne and Burgundy owned one of his publications. Unbeknownst to one another, an Avignon lawyer and a Parisian scribe both devoted journal entries to quatrain 1.53 in 1720. Its verses about gold mines and “a great nation in agony” justified their ire against John Law, a fraudulent Scottish financier who had devised a scheme that lured investors with (bogus) promises of profits in Louisiana. His Mississippi Bubble, as it was called, caused a stock market collapse in France.⁴

Seven years later, when an embattled predicator was brought before an ecclesiastical court for his heterodox ideas, he clamored that quatrain 1.7 announced his imminent vindication. A Parisian magistrate noted with astonishment that many people were linking quatrains to this case (this apparently did not include the bishops who deemed the predicator guilty). In 1744, while awaiting news of the French fleet’s attack on British warships, a Parisian lawyer found grounds for hope in quatrain 2.68, which mentioned great forces from the north, a door to the Ocean open wide, and London trembling. “If the famed Nostradamus is to be believed,” he noted in his journal, “this project must succeed.”⁵

All of this suggests that the eighteenth century could open itself to rational as well as magical outlooks, to reasoned interpretation as well as awe, even if the ratio was not always equal. There was no linear progression from an enchanted Middle Ages and early Renaissance to a skeptical modernity. Rather than depicting this period as the heyday of secular reason, some historians have lately spoken of changing inflexions between reason and magic, of cycles of disenchantment and reenchantment during which one resonates more than the other. To distinguish purely rational elites from a naïve populace—as if cultures were fortified castles—likewise misses the exchanges and borrowings, the shared beliefs and commingled horizons that make this period so fascinating. The learned often approached the supernatural with greater distance or diffidence than peasants or artisans, but, even in enlightened Europe, people from all walks of life returned to the notion that spirit could govern matter. They read prophecies, ordered horoscopes, pored over kabbalah, were amazed by the Tales of 1001 Nights, practiced alchemy, consulted fortune-tellers, and exchanged mystic secrets during Masonic rituals full of solar mythology. Many did so in private, but the century of Voltaire was also the century of the comte de Saint-Germain, a four-thousand-year-old alchemist who provided the secret of eternal life. It was also the century of Cagliostro, the Sicilian magician-alchemist who claimed to heal ailments through spiritual agencies. And in scattered encounters that can easily go undetected, it was also a century that made room for Nostradamus.⁶

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It took an unprecedented and unforeseen political crisis, however, for Nostradamus to blast once again into public view and for these guardsmen to single out his tomb. As in the past, the phenomenon came to the fore during a collective effervescence. The French Revolution began swiftly. A fiscal crisis launched a chain of events that toppled the feudal system and turned France into a constitutional monarchy by the end of 1789. The National Assembly enshrined universal rights, abolished ranks, reformed taxes and justice, and held national elections. The scale and speed of change proved dizzying. So much was torn down and so much was erected in a matter of weeks or months. But the new Assembly could not satisfy everyone. Two issues proved especially divisive. The first was the fate of priests, now required to swear an oath of loyalty to the revolution. In Salon, three of them swore the oath in January 1791 and then reneged in May, to widespread consternation. A month later, King Louis XVI and his family tried to flee France and join French aristocrats who had taken refuge in Austrian Belgium. The idea was promising, but the execution lagged behind. The king was recognized near Varennes, a small town abutting the border, and held there with his family above a grocery store until revolutionaries arrived to bring them back to Paris. The botched flight fanned fears of surprise attacks against the nation. It also presented France with a second quandary: what to do with a king who had so clearly repudiated the revolution? The killing of fifty Parisian demonstrators in July deepened antagonisms. Some deemed the Assembly too moderate; others found it too radical. All wondered where the country was heading.⁷

Against this backdrop of uncertainty, violence, dramatic reversals, and soon enough war and beheadings, French men and women projected themselves into the future. They tried to imagine the contours of a world that was confusedly taking shape. Omens and old prophecies grew ever more appealing. So did Nostradamus. Almanacs, newspapers, and pamphlets such as the Small Nostradamus commented on recent events while anticipating forthcoming ones. In 1790, the Journal de Paris published several quatrains with which “all of Paris is now occupied.” Among them was quatrain 2.10, which announced change and then a calmer state of affairs:

Editions of the Prophecies replaced some quatrains with new ones that suited current purposes. One of them announced that nuns and priests would soon perish on the scaffold. A supposed descendant of Nostredame linked the violent tremors of 1789 to a civil war ahead. According to the Republican Magician, Nostradamus had announced that this was “the greatest and most wondrous revolution to have ever taken place on the surface of the planet since its creation.” In England, too, collections of Prophetical Extractsincluded quatrains. The World, a London newspaper, reported in 1790 that Nostradamus had predicted the French Revolution’s decree outlawing monasteries.⁸

Most important, Michel de Nostredame had left an explicit prediction about the revolution. It garnered immediate attention and remained in public consciousness for decades. “Beginning with that [unidentified] year the Christian Church shall be persecuted more fiercely than it ever was in Africa,” Nostredame wrote in his epistle to Henri II, “and this shall last until the year seventeen ninety-two, which shall be considered the beginning of a new age [une rénovation de siècle].” Other medieval and Renaissance astrologers had identified the return of a rare conjunction of planets around 1789 and declared that it would mark stupefying change. But eighteenth-century pamphleteers remarked that none among them had foreseen the revolution as precisely as Nostredame. A leading revolutionary club posted the prediction outside its door for a week, inviting citizens to make up their own minds. Some partisans of the revolution believed that it announced massive political change, including the Civil Constitution of the Clergy (which allowed the state to appoint clerics and required priests to swear this oath of loyalty), the advent of the French republic (which occurred in September 1792), and an era that was free from religious superstition. On the other end of the political spectrum, some readers hoped that Nostradamus promised better times ahead for Catholics, who would no longer be subject to such harassment.⁹

A revolution that sought to establish a utopian world on the remains of an ancient, evil society clearly tapped millenarian aspirations, whether religious or secular. Some contemporaries depicted the revolution as a sign of the Apocalypse while others announced the imminent arrival of a messianic figure. Nostredame’s apocalyptic references and depiction of an epochal break in time could feed such expectations. Moreover, growing numbers of people in France assumed that the enemies of the revolution were busy plotting and conspiring. This was due to a mounting sense of crisis, or even panic, that was exacerbated by Louis XVI’s flight to Varennes. It also owed much to a collision between the remnants of a secretive courtly society and the revolutionary yearning for open politics. The arcane words of Nostradamus suited this way of thinking as well. The man who knew everything that had happened since his death would allow “truth to triumph,” announced one almanac in 1793. He would shine light on the mysterious forces that were turning France, and soon enough Europe as well, upside down. Obscure as they were, quatreins could speak to the revolutionary yearning for transparency. The point, then, is not that all or most revolutionaries now embraced Nostradamus. It is, rather, that these words could echo and nourish some of the era’s deepest obsessions, even when they contradicted one another.¹⁰

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All of this activity must have come to the attention of our guardsmen. But something else drew them to Nostradamus and the man’s tomb: a mysterious tale about his death that had nothing to do with the revolution per se. This story had first surfaced around 1600, when Chavigny claimed that Nostredame had foreseen his own passing. Like a voracious climbing plant, it had then sprouted off in multiple directions in the seventeenth century. People heard it from residents of Salon and from the Franciscans who guided visitors through the church. They also read about it in almanacs and prognostications and more respectable publications as well. Oral and written cultures seem to have borrowed from one another.

According to the first story line, Nostredame had told local peasants that they would never step on his throat after his death (this claim reflects his contentious relationship with some Salon residents). This is because he had ensured that his body be buried standing in a wall of the church. Some versions of the story claimed that this would allow him to remain in contact with the outside world, others asserted that this burial site captured his uncertain status between prophecy and sorcery. Regardless, the wall and his body’s location inside and outside the church were fine metaphors for a man who crossed boundaries. Another story line held that Nostredame had built a deep mausoleum in the church and filled it with books, a writing case, candles, ink, and paper. Fleeing worldly corruption and religious strife, he had secretly taken refuge there and bolted the doors shut behind him. The year 1566 marked his death to the world rather than his actual demise.¹¹

To deter interlopers, Nostredame cast a fatal curse on whoever dared to enter his vault. This was another story line, and it may have originated in Chavigny’s translation of his Latin epitaph. What some rendered as “O Posterity, do not grudge his rest,” he translated as “O Posterity, disturb not his ashes and trouble not his sweet rest.” Rumor soon had it that Nostredame had inscribed a warning on the vault’s stone door: “Woe to the one who opens me.” Some almanacs depicted men at arms guarding the entrance in chain mail. In 1714, a French diplomat made a special two-day trip from Marseille to visit the crypt. To his disappointment, he found an ordinary tomb—and no trace of the fearsome inscriptions about which so much had been written.¹²

The diplomat may have read stories about foolhardy visitors who had disregarded these warnings. According to the tale told at London dinner parties in the 1660s, the prophet had made townspeople swear never to open his tomb. Some of them broke this promise sixty years later, and they came upon an engraved brass plate on his breast. It scolded them and provided the exact date of their intrusion. Nostradamus had of course seen it coming. A widely disseminated version of this story held that two death row prisoners, who had been promised a pardon if they lifted the tombstone, died on the spot after doing so. Seated on a bronze chair, the glaring prophet warned future interlopers that they would suffer the same fate. Perhaps Nostredame had never died. Or perhaps the intruders had survived long enough to retrieve new quatrains that he had composed underground. By the late seventeenth century, almanacs provided vivid descriptions of the “opening of Nostradamus’s tomb” and then shared newly discovered predictions that readers could not find anywhere else. The legend was also a sales pitch.¹³

These various story lines surfaced in other myths and legends. The seer who had predicted his own death? Simon Forman. The alchemist who had designed his tomb? Nicolas Flamel. The prophet who rose from his grave? Merlin. The astrologer who left new predictions near his tomb? Regiomontanus. And the prowler who found a mighty book in the soothsayer’s vault? This one surrounded the Scottish wizard Michael Scot. Many religious traditions and initiations also featured a magician’s temporary death. The Nostradamus phenomenon nonetheless stood out by tapping all of these folkloric or archetypal story lines while leaving a real tomb and an enticing epitaph behind. It was once again about accumulation rather than invention—and about widespread celebrity. The tomb and its “amazing bones” had grown famous in their own right decades before the French Revolution. In 1792, a leading Parisian newspaper ran a letter from a reader who had scoured the crypt and found a prophecy announcing eye-opening happenings for the year to come. Whether one believed such predictions or not, it was now all but impossible to hear the name of Nostradamus, and much less visit his tomb, without entertaining the notion that something mysterious lurked underground.¹⁴

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All of this explains why the guardsmen headed for Nostradamus’s tomb that day. But it does not account for their behavior inside the church. Was it necessary to break the crypt open?

Many contemporaries viewed this as a desecration—a charged form of violence that vilifies a person, religious rituals, and the sacredness of eternal rest. French revolutionaries desecrated countless tombs of princes, nobles, and clergymen, all of them symbols of a despicable regime and a corrupt society. This violence grew endemic after the fall of the monarchy in 1792. The royal crypts in the Cathedral of Saint-Denis were defiled, and the bodies of past monarchs thrown into collective graves. Elsewhere, revolutionaries sacked mausoleums and decapitated recumbent effigies. In the town of Corbeil, near Paris, they took bones from church ossuaries, burned them on a public plaza, and then dumped the ashes into the Seine River. Desecration ultimately seeks distance from forces that are deemed reprehensible and threatening. Fashioning a new revolutionary order required the destruction of the old and its deleterious influence. It was a form of purification. Too much may have been at stake in Salon to leave the tomb alone.¹⁵

In Provence, as politically divided a region as any in France, members of the National Guard took it upon themselves to protect the revolution. Sometimes, this entailed wrecking castles and churches. Marseille’s guardsmen were among the most radical. The city’s National Guard had come under the helm of the Patriotic Assembly of Friends of the Constitution, a powerful revolutionary club that intervened in neighboring cities—such as Avignon—to keep enemies in check. The guard would soon adopt the bellicose “Marseillaise,” France’s future national anthem, as its marching song. As they returned from Avignon in the spring of 1791, these revolutionaries may thus have desecrated Nostradamus’s tomb and ransacked the church to punish a town that struck them as royalist. Cries against the National Assembly had after all been heard in Salon’s marketplace following the king’s arrest. These were perilous times, and the guardsmen may have targeted a seer whom they associated with the counterrevolution. By 1791, this made sense.¹⁶

Nostradamus, as we have seen, had lost political legitimacy since the time of the ghost’s visit. And yet the process was not perfectly linear. Isolated pamphlets and ephemeral publications deemed Nostradamus useful at a time in which battles raged and politics seeped into all aspects of life. Everything now became political: the clothes one wore, the name given to one’s children, even the sincerity with which one sang during festivals. Popular almanacs taught the revolution’s history and values while warring factions used all means at their disposal to express their views and silence their opponents. Polemics could thus trump legitimacy. On the left, it was claimed that Nostredame had predicted the advent of a glorious, harmonious era, free from tyrants and public debt. A pamphleteer named Melchior D’Odoucet declared in 1790 that the soothsayer had foreseen the revolution’s outbreak and predicted that it would soon bring glory to France. Quatrain 2.10 announced the end of turbulences: “before too long all things shall be ordained.” Some activists were fiercer. According to Nostradamus, they said, France should expect decapitated bodies, war against perverse ministries, and the death of the despot Louis XVI between 1793 and 1800. Whether interpreting quatrains or coining new predictions, these pamphleteers tapped a famous soothsayer who could unite virtuous citizens around a glorious future.¹⁷

Still, Nostradamus was moving toward the political right, along with prophetic language in general. Disenchanted, anguished, and resentful, royalists found in his quatrains portrayals of an apocalyptic battle and a disastrous finish for the revolution. The populace had usurped an authority to which it had no right. This is why, according to these words attributed to Nostredame, “this unjust, atrocious, vile action, / Will cost it much blood in the end.” The royalist Journal général de la cour et de la ville declared in 1790 that some of his predictions about the revolution had unfortunately come true: “Let heaven preserve us from the rest.” Three months later, it told readers to expect political turmoil and foreign invasions until 1792. That year, another polemicist depicted an imaginary procession that fulfilled one of Nostradamus’s supposed prophecies. Having achieved victory, the king and aristocrats paraded across a capital that ex-revolutionaries had swept clean, some of them dressed as monkeys.¹⁸

Many of Nostradamus’s most committed readers were likewise conservative. A member of a prominent aristocratic family copied five quatrains on a sheet of paper then wrote commentaries that betrayed his fears and hopes. The “major massacre” mentioned in quatrain 2.92 pertained to Louis XVI, who was decapitated in January 1793; the great nobleman forced to flee France for Spain in quatrain 3.54 had to be one of the king’s brothers. In 1792, a monk roamed Avignon’s marketplaces with a quatrain in hand, preaching about the upcoming triumph of monarchy and religion. When the revolution grew more violent a year later, a Scottish countess asked her reverend to explain what Nostradamus had to say. A strict Presbyterian with a doctorate in theology and a command of nine languages, this reverend had recently been appointed president of Dickinson College in Pennsylvania. To quench his curiosity about the future, he interpreted quatrains. He now concluded that a sham trial and an execution awaited Louis XVI following his arrest. One of his friends (a future president of Princeton) wondered how the revolution would end. Nostradamus provided a plain answer, said the reverend: “It will all go to the Devil at last.” Perhaps this is what the Scottish countess wanted to hear as well.¹⁹

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It is no wonder, therefore, that radicals equated Nostradamus with counterrevolutionary forces. Some even disqualified rivals by linking them to this figure. Enemies of the journalist Jean-Paul Marat dubbed him a “modern Nostradamus”; opponents of revolutionary leader Maximilien Robespierre likewise accused him of colluding with a prophetess whose annotated copy of the Prophecies was full of “imaginings that could be applied to the current revolution.” The guardsmen’s antipathy for Nostredame was thus part of a broader political climate in which prophecies were deemed anathema to revolutionary virtue and a healthy, well-governed society.²⁰

At the same time, these guardsmen took their place in a long line of detractors who had vilified Nostradamus since the sixteenth century. Early critics had questioned the man’s poetic and astrological skills, his visions, and the impact of his false predictions and errors. They sought to outline the boundaries of a prophetic universe, establish principles, and distinguish scientific truth from falsehoods or delusions. This continued throughout the seventeenth century. The Puritan preacher John Edwards wrote in 1684 that astrologers such as Nostradamus “step beyond the bounds of their Art, and hold Correspondence with Lucifer.” A few years later, a Jesuit heraldist could tolerate the almanac writer but not the false prophet who diluted the sacred mysteries of Scripture. The eighteenth century, however, all but stopped picking on an incoherent sap who, though unable to predict the future, had either believed in his revelations or else penned them to make a living. His behavior was risible, but so what? Why bother debating his prophetic status when the answer was obvious and the stakes insignificant? No institution or body of learning felt threatened to its core by the discredited knowledge for which he stood. The question, then, was no longer who Nostredame really was. Instead, it became: How does a rational society respond to such inane predictions?²¹

The heart of the matter was public credulity and what contemporaries called superstition. Clerics had long proscribed improper worship of the rightful God as well as magic and witchcraft. By the late seventeenth century, magistrates, doctors, and men of letters were insisting that feverish imagination combined with superstitious beliefs generated uncontrollable enthusiasm and passions. Mired in ignorance and poor judgment, superstition could lead people astray and undermine the social order. This is why it was so important to free newly-empowered citizens from such beliefs. “What is superstition?” asked an elementary textbook during the revolution. “The fear of invisible forces.” How does one protect oneself from it? By dominating one’s fears, distrusting imagination, and curbing the desire to know the future. Nostradamus captured all of these dangers: imagination running wild before incomprehensible happenings, credulity before a voice from above, fear before dire pronouncements. The belief that people could predict the future was perilous for it left no room for political will. Stories about Nostradamus’s crypt would not circulate as widely if they did not feed on base instincts.²²

Some eighteenth-century critics now used Nostradamus to deride the Renaissance as a confused, infantile era that believed in judicial astrology, soothsaying, and people burying themselves alive. How could it not have welcomed the deluded Nostredame and then made him famous? Catherine de Médicis and the like had believed these predictions and eerie tales and then encouraged others to do the same. This had continued under the Old Regime, but the revolution was mercifully ushering France into a new era. Nostradamus’s Prophecies “owed their success only to the ignorance and gullibility of his century,” remarked the authors of the French Traveler, a collective portrait of France, in 1789. Modern citizens, they then added, hardly believed that Nostredame had been buried alive in his tomb. Relegating Nostradamus to a superstitious past made it possible to commend the present era for puncturing such inanities. History was moving forward. We now know that pseudoprophets cannot see the future or survive underground. What the Renaissance venerated, what the Old Regime manipulated, we judge for what it is worth.²³

At least, some people do. “Old matrons and ignorant Plebeians” accepted these groundless prophecies, said the English essayist Charles Gildon in 1692. Throughout the eighteenth century, learned writers, gentlemen, and others (including many who adopted Enlightenment ideas) continued to look down upon the weakest, most gullible elements of society: the women and provincials, the peasants and artisans who succumbed all too easily to imagination and novelty. They were the ones who accepted Nostradamus’s predictions and gave credence to stories about ghosts or astrologers in crypts. Nostradamus, explained one French legal writer in 1743, is “so disdained by the sane echelons of society, and so respected by the credulous populace.” Some elite observers were convinced that the populace was vulnerable to superstitions because of its innate nature. Others blamed the conditions under which these people lived and accused malevolent leaders of dusting Nostradamus off whenever, as one revolutionary put it, they “needed to terrorize the peoples, or release themselves from the torments of their own consciences.” It thus fell upon the revolution to turn former subjects into clearheaded citizens who could distinguish truth from falsehood.²⁴

These detractors imagined that the Nostradamus phenomenon had not changed since the sixteenth century and that people parsed the predictions in the same way. Superstition was deemed static and unmovable. When they relegated Nostradamus to another era or another social world, they hence depicted a modern, progressive era that was freeing itself from wayward habits. They bolstered their self-worth while drawing boundaries and tracing the contours of modern rationality. Given its fuzziness, magic had long served as a foil in the West. Religious leaders dismissed sects as hollow and immature by accusing them of embracing magical beliefs. The forces of reason could likewise depict their triumphant victory by claiming that they were vanquishing magical tales and predictions. Such beliefs, they said, would soon vanish from the modern world.²⁵

This was the expectation, at least. But it is also possible that the guardsmen’s sudden, profane violence reflected uncertainty and self-doubt. The boundaries might not have been as resilient as they appeared. If Europe was moving confidently toward an enlightened future, then why worry about Nostradamus and the like? Was it not, rather, because the Old and New regimes had more in common than revolutionaries liked to admit? Was it not because, instead of vanishing, belief in superstitious tales seemed to take new forms? Was it not because Nostradamus expressed all too well the contradictory tendencies of an era that sought to put a certain past behind and yet could not shake off a thirst for intimations of the future? Was it not because elites shared beliefs, rumors, and fascinations that they associated with popular culture? Was it not, finally, because the guardsmen had either felt the force of Nostradamus or else—more frightening yet—doubted their own ability to resist such temptations?²⁶

A writer noted in 1792 that even sophisticated minds could end up in Nostradamus’s sepulcher. From this vantage point, the guardsmen’s actions sought to defuse anxieties about the blurry line between tradition and modernity. Let’s not risk it, their behavior in Salon seemed to say. Let’s smash the damned thing instead.²⁷

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Violence provides a rich, suggestive way of making sense of the day’s events in Salon. But it is not necessarily the only thing that was going on. As they dug out Nostredame’s bones, the guardsmen were also interacting with the dead—and this mattered at this time in a way it had not before.

For centuries, death had been part of the natural order in Western Europe. Buried within towns and villages, the dead belonged to the same community as the living. Ghosts, as we have seen, communicated with people and sometimes helped them out. By the eighteenth century, however, this relationship was coming apart. Cemeteries were moved to the outskirts of towns due to new hygienic concerns about foul, infectious odors. As religious practice declined, so did Christian notions of heaven and hell. A growing number of people began to see death as a complete break that left but a void or mystery on the other side. Some were mesmerized by this vertiginous encounter with loss and the passage of time. Many others struggled with this new uncertainty and the prospect of a definitive separation from loved ones. Mourning grew more ostentatious, with grand processions, long eulogies, lachrymose lamentations, and family vaults for those who could afford them. People collected memories that conferred immortality to the deceased. During this time of increasing individualism, they sought out physical traces imbued with the aura of illustrious personages. Soon enough, they would also try to communicate with the departed. Death repulsed, frightened, and intrigued at the same time.²⁸

Strange things took place in cemeteries as well. Medical students and anatomists looted graves for bodies that they could dissect. Other robbers, convinced that the shape of craniums corresponded to the sinews of the brain, went after the skulls of great men. To protect their bodies, some people enclosed their tomb behind railings, or bought cast-iron coffins that no crowbar could pry open. The fear of premature burial ran deeper still. Baffled by comas, trances, catalepsy, and other deathlike states, people began to question medical diagnostics of death. Rigor mortis was no longer conclusive. This fear generated other types of coffins, with airholes, shovels, bells, and even ejection devices. Wealthy families hired grave watchers. Newspapers fanned anxieties by publishing stories about people who woke up underground, prey to what Edgar Allan Poe called “the rigid embrace of the narrow house—the blackness of the absolute Night—the silence like a sea that overwhelms.”²⁹

Our guardsmen were not grave robbers, but they did infringe upon the tomb of someone who had reportedly buried himself alive and then rejoined the living. “I had promised to resuscitate in 1790,” Nostredame purportedly declared in one revolutionary pamphlet. “I have kept my word, and here I am, back in the capital of France.” Nostradamus hence responded to the era’s nervous fascination with death and the afterworld—what some called necrophilia. By penetrating the crypt of a man who may have died or perhaps had not, a man whose indefinite status between the living and the deceased mirrored all too well the era’s own doubts, the guardsmen confronted deeper anxieties about the afterworld. They did not necessarily do so in an explicit or conscious fashion. But the tomb and the tales provided a way of dramatizing such questions, grappling with them, and confronting one’s own fears and uncertainty. A few decades after the revolution, a leading French magazine recounted—or, rather, invented—Nostredame’s last conversation with his son César. The old man told his son that, as death descended upon him in the vault, he would have just enough time to jot down what lay on the other side. “The great secret shall be revealed to the world! I shall write it in a book, and man shall have victory over the universal victor!” The liminal Nostradamus remained meaningful on other planes besides terror. Morbid fascination could accompany desecration.³⁰

So could entertainment. If wonder and politics were two angles of the Nostradamus triangle in early modern Europe, then public amusement was the third. Enjoyment and practical guidance had long gone together in almanacs, which often presented their predictions as both useful and pleasant. Satirical farces and songs used Nostradamus to send up all-knowing astrologers or monks. By the eighteenth century, the man also surfaced in theatrical spectacles. In 1756, a French songwriter parodied the opera-ballets of the celebrated Jean-Philippe Rameau in a one-act play about an almanac writer that he titled Nostradamus. Twenty years later, Nostradamus gave his name to a play on the bourgeois penchant for astrology. During the revolution, Parisians could watch the dramaNostradamus, True Friend of the People and the pantomime Harlequin and Columbine Protected by Nostradamus. They could also catch one of the many representations of The Tomb of Nostradamus, a comic opera that had first been staged during Parisian fairs in 1714 and then performed repeatedly throughout the century. Its author, the famous playwright Alain-René Le Sage, helped fashion a genre that added plot, dialogue, and comical or mythological characters to the pantomime’s acrobatics and dances. As they sang the lyrics that actors held up on placards, spectators were equally amused and edified by marvelous spectacles that were both escapist parodies and acerbic social commentaries.³¹

Set in Salon, The Tomb of Nostradamus followed successive visitors into a book-lined vault that resembled a gentleman’s library. Ordinary folk were too frightened to penetrate the crypt, but these visitors mustered the courage to enter and consult this strange but wise man about their problems. Harlequin and Octavius went first, and they encountered a fire-spewing monster (who disappeared once Octavius kissed it) followed by a black magician whose wand opened the crypt’s door. There was the famed Nostradamus, surrounded by demons and goblins, composing “the resolutions of the fates” as he had been for two centuries. Octavius asked him to locate his estranged wife. The prophet obliged, fulfilled the requests of other visitors, provided sage advice to local residents, and then politely asked to be left alone. “In peace shall we leave the Great Nostradamus,” sang the chorus as the curtain closed.³²

Such spectacles brought images of Nostradamus and his tomb into the era’s cultural repertoire. They also show how much the phenomenon owed to this kind of entertainment. With the proliferation of cheap print, the success of vaudeville shows, and growing doubts about apparitions or miracles, this was true of all facets of the supernatural. Some historians claim that this process secularized and domesticated demonic voices and magical forces. This is true to a point: entertainment tames and makes things less corrosive. No one would be surprised if the guardsmen had shared a good laugh, albeit a nervous one, while venturing into the astrologer’s tomb. They may well have been reenacting or playacting a scene that they had first encountered in an almanac or on a stage. Others had done so in Salon before, though not to such an extreme. In 1761, two young journeyman glaziers dropped by Saint-François to see for themselves “all that people say about Nostradamus.” More precisely, they wanted to test the notorious curse. Inside the church, they slid a knife through the slits of the tomb and waited for something to happen. Nothing did. The glaziers then resumed their travels. I imagine that they were thrilled to have shared this moment together, but also relieved after debunking a legend that, as one of them put it, only “commoners believe.”³³

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Like the glaziers, the guardsmen may have playfully tested beliefs that could be true—or not. What happened in that crypt remains shrouded in mystery. This is how it must be, I suppose, when it comes to Nostradamus. But these tales transformed the way people pictured the man. Harlequin, Octavius, the glaziers, and the guardsmen were all looking for a wild magician who had buried himself alive rather than the learned, humane astrologer and prophet whom Chavigny had lionized two centuries earlier. To be sure, many Europeans still entertained images of the Renaissance humanist Nostredame. Biographical sketches could be found in encyclopedias and editions of the Prophecies. History did not vanish. But it was dissipating into fictional clouds. Between 1600 and 1800, a biographical Nostredame tinged with legend gave way to a legendary Nostradamus laced with biography.

By the mid-1600s, all kinds of stories circulated about the man’s wondrous life and extraordinary powers. In one tale, the astrologer invited the boy Henri IV to undress, scrutinized his body, and then promised that the throne would one day be his. In another story (perhaps the most frequently told), a gentleman asked Nostredame to predict which of his two piglets would be served for dinner that evening. When he picked the black piglet, the gentleman (who wanted to show him up) instructed his cook to covertly prepare the white one. Later that day, a wolf slipped into the kitchen and ate the animal, leaving the cook no choice but to serve the black one. Nostredame had been right, after all. In another popular tale, Nostredame unexpectedly kneeled before a young monk named Félice Peretti. When asked why, he explained that the future Pope Sixtus V deserved such respect. Whether drawn from popular lore, oral traditions, or literary motifs, stories about a wise, prescient seer endowed Nostradamus with new powers and attributes.³⁴

Sometimes, these tales erased his life story altogether. Besides a ghost, Nostradamus now came across as an atemporal figure who conversed with mythological heroes, an uncanny sorcerer, and a famed diviner who had left the depths of hell to speak the truth to the imprisoned Louis XVI. Le Sage’s play turned the benevolent “papa Nostradamus” into a wizard whose white beard reached to his belt. He wore a long-eared cap and a violet robe decorated with talismanic characters. His tomb was both a real place in Salon—the crypt that the guardsmen sought out—and a fictional one in the mold of Ali Baba’s cave, the setting for another Le Sage production. With their mix of reality and marvel, the comic opera’s dreamscapes helped turn the humanist into a diviner who embraced all supernatural activities. At once comic and mesmerizing, the all-knowing Nostradamus joined a universe of magical forces, potions, fairies, witches, monsters, and the living dead. One of the ironies of this story is that the learned humanist came to embody forces and entities that flourished in popular culture. The other irony is that the man with a real historical pedigree (something that cannot be said of all prophets) became the most elusive of figures. Unlike Jesus, whose altruism and humanity endured over the centuries he grew estranged from his initial virtues as he drifted across the hazy landscapes of posterity.³⁵ Nostredame and Nostradamus went in separate directions.

The closest parallel is the wizard Merlin, another favorite character in Le Sage’s plays. There are differences between Nostredame, who was rooted in history and whose posterity included multiple threads, and Merlin, who originated in poetry and fiction and remained wedded to the Arthurian legend. Still, they resembled one another by the eighteenth century, two protean enchanters who inhabited mysterious tombs and changed shapes to meet the yearnings of successive generations. While Nostradamus prevailed in France, Merlin did so in England, where astrological publications carried titles such as English Merlin. French journalists described Merlin as the Nostradamus of England. Across the Channel, Nostradamus was presented as the Merlin of France. Prophets and soothsayers would for a time carry passports in the age of nation-states, but these two legendary figures now marched side by side in media, entertainment, and the popular imagination.³⁶

Nostradamus’s legend flourished because the phenomenon’s early deficits—lack of glory and heroism, a structuring myth, and enduring moral content—deprived it of a sturdy foundation. The man who circulated between realms could not secure the backing of a collective entity that would enshrine or protect his life story. Nor could he resemble those compassionate saints who, in return for solace, ask the devout to keep them in the public eye. Memory distorts, but it can also preserve when groups feel that they have something to defend. This was not the case here. As the religious stakes surrounding the Prophecies decreased in intensity, as credence in his prophetic status and astrology waned, as cults of saints lost their local grounding, determining Nostredame’s status and his relationship to Christian creed grew less urgent. Nostradamian providers could not agree whether he had drawn his powers from poetic furor, astrology, a sixth sense, or an understanding of human psychology. Some stopped worrying about it. Detractors, too, shifted their sights away from Nostredame himself, or else depicted him as a crazed magician in order to better dismiss him. In the “burlesque hell” of one critic, the venomous Nostradamus wore a long robe and muttered devilish formulas.³⁷

Nostradamus remained famous—le fameux Nostradamus—but the French fameux also means memorable or impressive. If impressing readers or spectators required that one take liberties with biography, then so be it. This was especially true in entertainment and popular media, which tend to unmoor traditions from their original settings. Snippets of his life story, anecdotes, titillating tales, and fresh predictions from the grave came together in those marshes where fiction and make-believe seep into truth and history. Unlike cultural traditions that grow meaningless but endure by force of habit, Nostradamus kept on changing. The figure grew yet more fleeting and unstable, yet more illegitimate as a source of information, yet more preposterous and removed from the concerns of many people. At the same time, ignorance about the phenomenon’s causes endowed it with an extraordinary, wondrous veneer. Nostradamus also grew more macabre and controversial, more alluring and mesmerizing.

By 1816, an English periodical could thus refer to “the tomb of the prophet, or magician, for he might be called either, or rather both.” Whatever. Whether Nostredame had been a soothsayer or a sorcerer was irrelevant as long as he told us our story, a French journalist wrote a few years later. And plenty of people still entertained the notion that, even if they could not place the strange Nostradamus in time, this voice from the past could tell such stories. Most of them did not care that these stories—the ones that endured, at the very least—typically surfaced after rather than before a given event. ³⁸ After all, one of the most discussed quatrains in the nineteenth century (9.20) was widely seen as a prediction of Louis XVI’s flight to Varennes in 1791:

London’s Gentleman’s Magazine provided a full explanation in 1890. The forest of Reines—or rather Rennes-en-Grenouilles (spelled “Raines” in earlier times)—sat between Paris and the village of Varennes. Deux pars designated the royal couple. Herne was an anagram for the French reine (queen) “by metaplasm of h for i.” Marie-Antoinette wore white clothes—the color of her hair in the wake of her arrest. Louis XVI had chosen an iron-gray coat and a round slouch hat that made him look like a Franciscan monk.Vaultorte (an ancient French word for about-face) conveyed his irresolution. Louis could be described as a Capet (cap.), a member of the dynasty that had acceded to the French throne in the tenth century, and as “elected,” since the revolution made him a constitutional monarch. “Blood, sword,” finally, referred clearly enough to the fate that awaited the king and his wife. Whether in London, Dublin, or New Orleans, there were people who believed, or knew people who believed, that Nostradamus had predicted revolutionary events. “Here again we find a dark record flashing upon us with all the certainty of an eye-witness,” said the Gentleman’s Magazine. Whoever he might be, the famous Nostradamus lived on.³⁹

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When the guardsmen left Salon, it fell upon the town leaders to handle the aftermath. The mayor was a moderate revolutionary whose achievements included new markets and new forms of public charity. He was also a local booster who cared about public edifices and monuments, a rarity during these times of widespread destruction. By 1791, revolutionaries had seized, vandalized, and sold off countless ecclesiastical and aristocratic buildings. French churches and convents were now used as prisons, barracks, and warehouses. Adjoining cemeteries commonly became vacant lots. Much as he tried, Salon’s mayor could not save the Church of Saint-François. The edifice and its convent were parceled into dozens of lots and auctioned off to local residents, who promptly dismantled the buildings and sold the raw materials. All of the bodily remains were moved to a new cemetery—all, that is, except for Nostredame’s. The mayor and the city council collected whatever bones they could find—local inhabitants had taken some of them home—and transferred them to the Collegiate Church of Saint-Laurent. Nostredame’s new tomb lay across from the entrance, in the chapel of the Virgin Mary, behind protective mesh. There were portraits of Nostredame and César, the family’s coat of arms, and a new epitaph honoring a man “whose memory will always be treasured by French patriots given his predictions about the reign of freedom.” Salon’s mayor reinvented Nostradamus for revolutionary times.⁴⁰

The epitaph said nothing about the guardsmen, but their story endured in popular and commercial culture. A French almanac related in 1794 that the intruders had found a handwritten note predicting the emancipation of France. Later accounts claimed that the men had died in an ambush, or else that Nostredame’s body had been reburied in a field. Such tales dovetailed all too well with the era’s Gothic literature, which exposed hidden conflicts and secrets from the past by exploring the eerie junction between the natural and the supernatural. Prisons, abbeys, castles, graveyards, and crypts were favorite backdrops. After the revolution, novels and short stories liked to depict Nostredame’s funeral and his fate inside the crypt. In some of them, he walked to the vault surrounded by throngs of local residents, pressed a button to lift a huge stone, revealed a quatrain enveloped in flames, and then vanished forever. In others, he went to his tomb carrying royal jewels or his Mighty Book of Spells, “iron clasped and iron bound.”Nostradamus, an 1833 novel of dark predictions, unrequited love, and vengeance, ends with such a tale. The prophet cloisters himself in a vault with a young woman who has spurned his advances. Decades later, interlopers uncover their two skeletons. Nostredame is seated on a chair, quill in hand, while the woman is attached to a gate, the flesh of her wrists eaten off in a desperate attempt to escape. What a haunting “picture of furor and death, terror and rage,” gushed one reviewer.⁴¹

The most memorable picture of terror and rage I uncovered took place in Aix-en-Provence in 1806. A young peasant who fancied himself a prophet decided to emulate Nostradamus and bury himself alive. He began digging a grave on his own and then asked a passerby to complete the job. As word spread, local residents rushed over to pull the peasant out of the ground. By the time they arrived, his skin was black and he could barely breathe. Still, this modern prophet was strong enough to berate his rescuers for thwarting a divine design. The Journal de Paris reported the news—a true story that fueled the very legend from which it had sprouted. It was easy and so appealing for educated Parisians to laugh at this superstitious peasant and those strange expanses in which one could not tell what was true and what was not. There is a fine line, however, between laughing and squirming. This morbid incident, like the guardsmen’s desecration, captures the uneasy mix of disquiet, gravity, and playfulness that surrounded Nostradamus at the turn of the nineteenth century. Its legitimacy faltered, but the lure and the stakes remained high.⁴²