Apocalypses by Eugen Weber

Author:Eugen Weber [Weber, Eugen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-36618-4
Publisher: Random House of Canada
Published: 1999-11-30T05:00:00+00:00

But this work is not about anti-Semitism, which is a long-running plague; it is about end-of-the-worldism, which is another. We have seen that Jews sometimes attain high visibility as harbingers of the end; most of the time, however, all they get is walk-on parts or silence. Gérard de Nerval, for example, strikingly representative of Romanticism in his appreciation of the exotic and fantastic, of irrationalism and occultism, translated Faust in the 1820s and brought back wild theories about Solomon and Sheba from the Orient, but showed no interest in Jews. In the spring of 1853 he went to see his friend, Heinrich Heine, whose poems he was translating into prose, and told him he had come to return the cash advance he had received for the work because the times were accomplished and the end of the world was at hand. Heine sent for a cab, and Nerval spent the following months in Dr. Dubois’s clinic.35

It is not clear whether other mid-century eschatologists were deranged.36 But plenty of works by clerics and nonclerics testify to sustained interest in the millennium and the Second Coming. Some millenarians, repelled by Napoleon III’s failure to support the pope, even cast him as Antichrist. What is clear is that the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71 gave the old religion, replete with apocalyptic images, a philip. As early as 1871, a priest from war-scarred Lorraine, J.M. Curicque, brought out a new edition of his Prophetic Voices that cited all the familiar signs of doom: blasphemy abounding, Sundays profaned, comets, meteorites, sightings of flying serpents and armies battling in the skies, ciboriums crying tears, stigmatics, bleeding hosts, visions, apparitions, prodigies, miraculous cures, holy images emitting odors, pearling blood or tears, not to mention thorns growing out of St. Theresa’s miraculously preserved hut.37 The throng of visionaries and prophets inspired the Bishop of Orleans, Félix-Antoine Dupanloup, to issue a Letter on the Prophecies (1874) warning against those who interpreted the Apocalypse in the light of Nostradamus: “A whole generation gluts itself on chimeras … trembles before calamities forecast, as before the coming of the year 1000.”

But prophecies soldiered on, and many carried political overtones. At Pellevoisin in the Indre, in one of those small “Vendées” that withstood the French Revolution, and where the village priest had been guillotined in 1793, a maiden’s visions of the Virgin set off a flow of pilgrims to her shrine. Estelle Faguette’s sanctuary of the 1870s still stands close to the grave where Georges Bernanos rests today. Other women have been forgotten. But at Fraudais, in the Loire-Inférieure, Marie-Julie, stigmatist and visionary, repeated messages received from the Virgin and St. Michael predicting the victory of evil, terrible woes, the burning of Paris, and the coming savior. At Francoulès, near Cahors, Pauline Périé prophesied great woes followed by religious and royal restoration. And at Bouleret (Cher), Josephine Réverdy foretold great massacres, great public calamities, a great pope, and a great king of Naundorff’s family.38

There were more like these women. As late as the 1890s,

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