The signs that Master Michel Nostradamus was in high favour in the political firmament would be apparent early on. He was received at the court of King Henri II in 1555 (perhaps in 1556) and Catherine de Médicis and her son King Charles IX would visit him for a consultation at Salon in 1564, during their tour of the French kingdom. Despite the attacks aimed at his direction by Calvinists and non-Calvinists alike, his reputation was such that, in order to put to rest the alarms rumoured throughout the realm about the poor health of Charles IX, the queen mother wrote to the Constable Anne de Montmorency. The stargazer of Salon-de-Crau had promised the king, she told him, ‘that he would live as long as you will, whom he said would outlive his ninetieth year’.1 Nostradamus justified the eminence accorded him by his contemporaries by pointing out that his utterances had come true. In 1555, he readily put it abroad that ‘long ago and often I have predicted, and long before, what would afterwards come to pass’.2 Yet what he predicted is surely what he was warning against. This is precisely the dramatic and exponential rise in human passions to which his writings were an antidote. We must remain always and forever on our guard in interpreting Nostradamus’ diction and its perpetual ambivalence and duality.
The tragic death of King Henri II, killed by the shard of a lance in a jousting tournament in 1559, would be the epoch's cataclysmic event, interpreted by Calvinists and Catholics alike as a critical moment. Much later on, it seemed that Nostradamus had predicted the event in one of his quatrains.3 The quatrain in question (1:35) had appeared in the first edition of the Prophecies in 1555:4
The young lion shall overcome the old
On the field of battle in one-to-one combat:
In golden cage the eyes he will put out,
Winner takes all, then death most cruel.
At the time, however, contemporaries above all noticed the reference in the Almanac for the Year 1557.5 Here, whilst promising Catherine de Médicis great prosperity, Nostradamus wrote: ‘Calculating from 1556 to 1558, and including the present [year 1557] Diophanus of Nicea [says that] there will then be a change of Monarchy, not of the dynasty but of the Prince, involving the highest ranks, although however it turns out we shall entrust to the infinite power of God’.6 Another, very ambiguous prediction supports it for the month of July 1559: ‘In this month France will be the loser by several foreign Princes, by an unexpected death, and by foreign tongue which will be much lamented. By the Hebdomades of Democritus it is ascribed sub Ariete [under Aries], whilst Zoroaster ascribes it to 1559 then felicity’. We should not, however, read these texts word for word. So, when it comes to the quatrain (3:5) that evokes ‘the grandee of Blois’ whom his friend will put to death, the author – or the typographer – corrected it retrospectively to read ‘grain de Bloys’. That way it more clearly alluded to Gabriel de Lorges [‘orge’ = barley], Count of Montgomery, the wielder of the fatal lance that killed the king in 1559.
At all events, the reputation of Nostradamus as a prophet of the future was probably consolidated by the dramatic events of July 1559. They are at the root of his appeal as a astrophile who, in terms of the resonances of his writing, did not stand out much from other contemporary astrologers whom he plagiarized, just as they did him. This made him the object of pastiches and pirated editions, especially in 1560, when the religious and political situation seemed headed for disaster. This is how Ronsard celebrated Nostradamus’ renown for predicting the future:7
France, of thy ills thou art in part the cause,
A thousand times I have thee in my verse forewarned… .
You see then how little thou takest it all to heart,
Thy cheeks should be blushing at the shame of it.
Thou mockest also the prophets that God chooses amongst thy children,
And places in the midst of thy bosom in order to predict to thee thy future misfortune.
But thou does simply laugh at them.
Perhaps the immense eternity of the great God has aroused Nostradamus’ fervour.
Or perhaps a good or bad demon kindles it.
Or perhaps his spirit is moved by nature, and climbs to the heavens,
Beyond mortals, and from there repeats to us prodigious facts.
Or perhaps his sombre and melancholy spirit is filled
With crass humours making him fanciful.
In short, he is what he is; so is it always with the doubtful words
Of his prophetic voice, like that of an ancient oracle
He has for many a year predicted the greater part of our destiny.
I would not have believed him, had not Heaven, which assigns good and evil
To human kind, been his inspiration.
The prophecy that stimulated Ronsard into penning this panegyric was the one from Nostradamus, which he then himself adapted: ‘Our Prince in the midst of pleasure died …’.8 The point (and we shall return to it) is more important than it appears at first sight. It resulted in a kind of hijacking of the meaning in Nostradamus’ work, or rather a misappropriation of it. Nostradamus himself did not react to what happened because it added lustre to the extraordinary aura that was developing around his name, and at a time when he could hardly remain impassive towards the attacks that were being mounted against him, from both Catholic and Protestant quarters. He sustained and nurtured this protective aura because it gave him a privileged access to favour in high places. But it becomes one of the hurdles that the historian has to overcome, a distortion that stands in the way of historical analysis. Moreover, he himself had a premonition of the perilous situation that those who followed his religious ideas could find themselves in.9 He evokes enigmatically in another quatrain what perhaps would happen to those (including himself) who had been protected and promoted for their learning by a king who then dies:10
Those most versed in celestial lore,
Shall by ignorant princes be condemned:
Banned by edicts, expelled like criminals,
And put to death wherever they are found.
This menacing prospect recurs in another quatrain, in which Nostradamus predicts that the number of astronomers will increase so considerably that they will eventually be banished and expelled, and their books censured.11
Nostradamus’ fate seems to have preoccupied other contemporary astrologers as well as himself – Claude Fabri (fl.1500–60), Lucas Gauricus (1476–1558), Cyprien Leowitz (c.1514–1574).12 Everywhere the signs are that the collective fascination for the stars was a much broader phenomenon.13 It makes its presence felt in the despatches of Italian ambassadors, drawing their information, as is well known, mainly from rumours circulating at court. In a despatch dated 20 November 1560, the Venetian ambassador Michel Suriano reports on the illness of King Francis II that ‘many say that the illness is grave’ and that his courtiers are all aware of the horoscope predicting that he will not outlive his eighteenth year. He does not tell us whether the dire events that would follow his death were predicted in the horoscope or whether the ‘universal revolution in religion in the realm’ under the regency of Antoine, King of Navarre, influenced by the same heresy that had infected much of the rest of the population, was a bit of spontaneous prophetic deduction.14
Two days before the young king Francis actually died, it was the turn of the Florentine ambassador Niccolò Tornabuoni to report back to Cosimo de’ Medici on 3 December 1560 that there was a sense of imminent catastrophe in the air at the French court. It was generated by a sense that fantastic astrological predictions were about to be realized, predictions that this time are attributed explicitly to Nostradamus himself: ‘The king's health remains still uncertain …’. If Francis II died, everything risked collapsing – or rather, everything would collapse since his death had been predicted as also bringing about the death of the kingdom itself. ‘This is what is said; and Nostradamus seems to have predicted it, he who says in his prognostication for this month that the cadet prince will bring about the downfall of the monarchy through an unexpected illness’.15 In apprehension and foreboding at the coming downhill career into instability, portrayed as a great temporal shift (mutatio temporum) or as the end of Time, the religious wars had already begun in people's minds, convinced that they were witnessing the beginning of a period of rupture which they already feared would be highly disruptive. Prophetic utterances were given credence and acquired objectivity such that predicting events seems to have become something of an obsession. Prophetic anticipation of what was to happen acquired an authenticity around 1560 such that the real train of events could no longer be clearly divorced from the fantasies about what was about to take place. This atmosphere of ‘latency’ gave credence to what Nostradamus had written in his ‘Preface’ to his son César, predicting that before ‘the universal conflagration, there will be so many deluges and major floods that shall befall the world that there shall remain scarcely any land that is not covered by water, and that this shall go on for so long that, were it not for the surviving oceanographies and topographies, all would be utterly lost’.16 The cycle of time will culminate with a flood, and then a fire falling from the skies as incandescent rocks rain down ‘before the final conflagration’. Then a new planetary cycle will begin. Hence his vision of a ‘revolution which breaks wholly with the past’ (‘une anaragonique revolution’), something that is certain to transpire because the world is at the end of its seventh millennium:17
… which brings everything to a close; we are approaching the eighth, the seat of the firmament of the eighth sphere, at the altitude where almighty and eternal God shall accomplish the revolution by which the signs of the zodiac shall return to their movements and to that higher motion which renders our earth stable & firm & non inclinabitur in saeculum saeculi (which shall not vary from age to age): except that all this come to pass as His will be done, but in no other wise.
Nostradamus’ conviction that the earth is immutable, eternal, ‘for ever and ever’ (in the words of the Psalmist), was a certainty that could be read in panic mode.18
The court was not the only place to be overwhelmed by a sense of imminent catastrophe apparently inspired by Nostradamus. The difficulty, however, is to determine what role Nostradamus actually had in the emergence of this panic mentality, which itself was driven from a number of quarters. The cathedral canon in Lyon, Gabriel de Saconay, recalled later on, in the shadow of the dramatic events of the massacre of Saint Bartholomew in 1572, with some agitation how, two years before the beginning of the troubles of the civil war, that he had been invited to dinner by a local notable. Nostradamus was among the guests and he stood before a window overlooking the city. Invited to reveal his thoughts to the rest of the guests, he said: ‘I am contemplating this beautiful cathedral of St-Jean. Its ruin is foresworn, and were it not for God's protection of it because divine services are celebrated there so religiously, nothing would remain of it but stone on stone’.19 Another element of the elaboration of this Nostradamian myth that one could adduce concerns an incident of sedition which occurred in Toulouse on 15 February 1563. The Genevan Protestant source, the Histoire ecclésiastique, recounted it in order to denounce ‘that riff-raff of diviners and prognosticators, punishable under every divine and human law’. Its editor, Théodore de Bèze, held Nostradamus responsible for an uprising amongst its Catholic populace. He had dispatched letters to ‘some people’ in the city, warning them that it was at risk of being taken by surprise the coming day. That night, ‘the populace – Catholic – seeing each other armed to the hilt, rose up in such a fashion […] that the city only narrowly escaped being ransacked’.20
Almanacs were above all the way by which the sinister fate of the world that Nostradamus appeared to have told them about was spread abroad. The private journal of Gilles de Gouberville, is particularly revealing about the popular influence of astrology. Its attraction was in the ascendant in the years before the civil wars, and seemingly more for its astro-meteorologic predictive capacities than for its prophetic dictums. Gouberville, a country gentleman from Mesnil-au-Val on the Cotentin peninsula in Normandy, shows no sign of having had any knowledge of, or interest in, astronomic subjects before 1556. Then suddenly in 1557, he recorded on Monday 14 December that it was the ‘day of the solstice’ and that (to avoid needless peril one supposes) he would not venture forth. A similar remark appears on 12 December of the following year. This development could well have been the result of consulting Nostradamus’ almanacs since he tells us unambiguously on 29 October 1558 that his decision on what to do that day was at his instigation: ‘I began to sow wheat at Haulte-Vente. Nostradamus said in his almanac that it was a good day to work the fields’. In November 1560 Gouberville sent his faithful Guillemette to Bayeux to buy an almanac for eight pence (deniers). He gives us some details on how such printed prognostication circulated at large for, on 20 November 1562, he tells us that he had organized before a notary for a ‘prognostication of Nostradamus’ that he had lent out to lieutenant Franqueterre’ to be returned to him, and ‘I gave him back the receipt which he had given me for it’.21
The Nostradamian myth spread outside the milieu of the court in other ways as well. In the course of 1562, the catholic priest from Provins, Claude Haton, recorded that Ronsard had warned Catherine de Médicis – in prose, no less! – that she should take even more notice than she was accustomed to do of the predictions of the astrophile from Salon, and correlate them with the various mounting signs of trouble on earth and in the heavens. What one might have been tempted to dismiss out of hand now had to be taken as a matter of the utmost urgency since war, plague, and the shrinking value of earthly goods was all attributable to the ‘abolition of the true and apostolic Roman religion’:22
If these premonitory signs have not stirred you to act, Madam, I remind you, and ask you to take account of, the writings of Master Michel Nostradamus, a doctor of medicine and a great mathematician. In his almanacs and predictions over these past 12 years, he has predicted all the ills which have transpired under your government, and which will come to pass if you do not listen carefully to what he has written and dedicated to Your Majesty. His envious detractors, enemies to all truth, call him a false prophet and liar, and they have traduced this Nostradamus. Yet the events that he predicted have for the most part, happened. His enemies therefore will stop attacking him and instead regard him as a true prophet of God, specially chosen at this juncture to predict our ills. Therefore, Madam, being stirred to action by all these prodigious happenings, you should now put things right, in accordance with your responsibilities, in everything that concerns the honour of God, the maintenance of his Catholic church, the preservation of the hallowed customs of our ancestors, and the profit of the king and the kingdom.
Nostradamus thus became celebrated as the possessor and transmittor of oracular wisdom. This explains why, following his death there would be Nostradamus surrogates like Michel Nostradamus the Younger and Antoine Crespin Nostradamus who would publish almanacs and prognostications that consciously picked up on and continued his style of writing. Even so, it was not until the latter years of the sixteenth century that the Nostradamian myth would fully take off, by which time it was possible to be convinced that the reign of the first Bourbon king, Henry IV, was even more the inevitable outcome of destiny than was that of Nostradamus, king of prophets.
Nostradamus’ fame was also, however, an outcome of the attacks that were directed against him in print – from presses in Paris as well as Avignon – and to which he replied in kind in his own publications. They came from several directions and he alluded to them several times, defending himself against those who defamed his profession. Writing in Latin at the end of the ‘Sixth Century’ of the Prophecies he said:23
Incantation of the law against Inept Critics
Let those who read these verses consider them profoundly;
Let the profane and ignorant multitude not cross swords with them,
And may all Astrologers, Rustics and Barbarians give them a wide berth;
Whoever acts otherwise, may he do so with due reverence and respect.
The attacks began in Catholic circles with that of the Dominican Esprit Rotier in the spring of 1555, who published his two-volume attack on astrologers in Toulouse (In praefatores prognosticosque futurum euentuum diuinatricemque astrologiam libri duo), and also that of Antoine Couillard in Paris, whose Refutations (Contredits) was written around 1555 but only published in 1560. In this latter work, Nostradamus was held up for a fool in a satire that was tinged with a hint of ‘political and religious conservatism’ and, more problematically, with an undertone of being philo-calvinist.24 He was taken to task as being one of those who was corrupting the renaissance of French language and culture. In the book, the seigneur du Pavillon laid into Nostradamus for spreading anxiety and ‘a marvellous doubt as to whether the world can last that much longer’. His purported astrology generates panic, separating people from the knowledge of God. Far from encouraging them to direct their thoughts towards Him, he forces them back into their own carnal existence: ‘That surely makes the fearful tremble with a terrible fear of the present and future, and drives them into a morass of frightful emotional troubles’.25 Three ‘sects’ are responsible, in Antoine Couillard's eyes, for the growing malaise. Firstly, intellectuals use their knowledge to meddle in the interpretation of Scriptures; secondly, dunces slander what has been for ‘so’ long commonly held as the truth; above all, there are the astrologers. The latter are the most dangerous because their audience is much larger, and because they ‘want to turn us into barbarians and idolaters to make us (if they can) believe any number of pretended future catastrophes and presages of disasters ahead, and they dare try and predict all that God has wanted to keep as a secret for Himself’.26
One should add to this the pamphlet, probably coming from a conformist religious perspective, though not even that is beyond doubt, by Laurent Videl, published in 1558 at Avignon and aiming to defend established judicial astrology against the ‘utterly crazy speculations’ of Nostradamus, whom he equated with ‘sorcerers’ and ‘enchanters’. In La déclaration des abus, ignorance et seditions de Michel de Nostradamus de Salon de Craux Videl repeated the charge that the predictions of Nostradamus the astrophile renewed a strand of pagan thought which challenged God's omnipotent glory, ‘such that no influence that the stars promise, and come to signify to us, can bring good or evil to pass unless it is in accordance with His good will, for it is God that determines all their motions, and He can make them go contrary to their natural paths if it is His good pleasure to do so… .’.
Nostradamus was, as Olivier Millet has remarked, caught in the crossfire, which is further proof that his impact was a destabilizing one, disquieting (because he could be read more than one way) those who adhered to the Roman Catholic church as well as the disciples of the new evangelical faith. In reality, there would be openly Calvinist texts that would take Nostradamus the astrologer to task – implicitly in the case of Jean de la Taille's Saül le furieux of 1557–8, explicitly in La Première Invective du Seigneur Hercules le François, contre Monstradamus, traduicte du latin of 1558, the latter opting for a satiric mode in order to underline the astrophile's wild ramblings. One cannot leave out of account, either, the Monster of Abuse, published in Paris in 1557, which sought not only to invalidate Nostradamus’ astrological credibility and to denigrate the results of his suppositions, which robbed Almighty God of his heavenly power, but also to denounce the obscure writing style of a ‘poet who had earned himself a dunce's cap’.27 If he was guilty of ‘abuse’ and the ‘author of lies and damnable superstition’ it was especially because, by presuming to a knowledge of God's ways, his heart was not ‘sealed with the fear’ of them.28 Like Lucian of Samosata, Nostradamus operates, says his accuser, by summoning up two tyrannical forces that govern the minds of contemporaries: fear and hope … . Nostradamus’ incredible crime was not merely to contravene God's majesty, encroaching on divine omnipotence, presuming to know what He alone knows, but also to create a God over and against the true God:
That if his prattling comes to pass
It's all the laws will have to change,
Since another God he'll forge for us.29
Nothing he wrote as coming to pass happened. Quotations from his writings are used to mock Nostradamus’ use of language, bringing it down to the level of the simply ‘stupid and silly’. So ‘the decoction of poppies will be experimentationalment to the city by the tyrannized satrap’; to which the reply is: ‘Is that all? For my part, it's a juicy appetizer of what is in store for the health of the Christian religion. But those who flatter themselves in thinking that they understand it might as well congratulate themselves on having turned a black man white by giving him a wash’.30 Although the theme is the offense he gives to God's power, it is human folly which is brought to the fore, for Nostradamus’ strange words are uttered from ‘a mandrel with a three-headed dummy on top of it, or a true fool with two cuffs’ who imagines that he can assault the highest heavens of the Almighty.31 For, even though Olivier Millet limits the use of language in the Monstre d’abus to an evangelical, Gallican or Reformist register, even if it seems to him that it does not embrace Calvinist dogmatic tenets, it is also equally possible that the text could have emanated from a Reformed Calvinist, writing in conformity with the Calvinist denunciation of astrology, but in the guise of someone with other points of view. It could be the work of a Calvinist masquerading behind a confirmed humanism in order the better to disqualify Nostradamus, who drags ‘God down from Heaven by the beard’, by having recourse intentionally to the writings of his adversary, as though covering himself in the latter's clothing. Renaissance intellectuals, after all, enjoyed playing games with each other. The reality was that the attacks on Nostradamus were aimed significantly at what lay at the heart of his epistemology, defending and illustrating divine omnipotence, which was precisely what his detractors said he had dressed down to the level of the merely human.
For the central plank in all these pamphlets’ attacks against the prophet from Salon was that, by the aid of astrological wisdom that was not so much subversive as feeble and riddled with approximation and error, he presumed to know what God alone could know and thereby subverted the glory of the divine. Yet does not this critical crossfire enable us to envisage a Nostradamus shimmeringly impenetrable, a Nostradamus knowingly contingent in his own personal beliefs? If conformist Catholics and Calvinists under various guises came together as one to criticize him, was it not because the astrologer from Salon situated himself precariously aslant, religiously, from their confessional (i.e. dogmatic) convictions? The question can simply be put like this: should we not see his Erasmian approach as at the origin of these attacks, precisely because it produced a discourse of subjective contingency?