Nostradamus by Stéphane Gerson

Author:Stéphane Gerson
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: St. Martin's Press

No single inhabitant shall remain:

Des habitans un seul n’y demourra:

Its walls & women, churches & nuns raped,

Mur, sexe, temple, & vierge violée,

All dying by sword, fire, cannon, plague.

Par fer, feu, peste, canon peuple mourra.

One journalist claimed to have encountered many people who believed in Nostradamus with greater confidence than they did in the Gospels. Others read the quatrains and found intimations of a reckoning for the fallen nation. By repenting and expiating their guilt, the elect could obtain salvation and usher in the reign of Christ on earth. A renovated church, a restored monarchy, a new moral order—all of this loomed. Millennialism thrived once again.5

Torné-Chavigny’s booklets were all the rage, said Georges Bois. The abbot found innumerable signs of the Last Days in the quatrains, from Napoléon’s bloody battles to the Italian campaigns that weakened the papacy’s temporal power. He then predicted the deaths of Italian king Victor Emmanuel II and Pope Pius IX and the return of the French Bourbons under a legitimate king, the comte de Chambord, who would rule as Henri V. This clear, transcendent framework ordered chaotic events while signaling the end of a century-long civil war. It also fed royalist dreams of victory by reactivating the old messianic notion of the Great Monarch as savior. The abbot was not the only one to reclaim Nostradamus in this fashion: all kinds of people did so in articles, songs, and ten-centime pamphlets. But none turned Nostradamus against the Third Republic with as much vigor as Torné-Chavigny. He captured not only the anguish and desolation but also the fiery self-confidence of Catholics who refused to bow before secular reason. Shining forth from his tomb, Nostradamus’s prophetic light would blind materialism and disbelief. Like others, Bois found echoes of his own “hotheaded and unrelenting” royalism in the writings of Torné-Chavigny. Nostradamus’s political arrogation by elements of the Catholic right was now complete in France.6

The fearless abbot resolved to fight secular heretics and the republic on their own ground. Lobbying conservative deputies and aristocrats would not suffice. In Paris, he went after left-wing intellectuals and freethinkers. One day, it was Ernest Renan, the controversial historian who had depicted Jesus as a charismatic leader rather than the son of God. Another day, it was Victor Hugo, novelist and political radical. Torné-Chavigny followed the same plan each time: “I will find him, my old Nostradamus in hand, and he will be forced to acknowledge prophecy and miracles.” The black-frocked abbot dropped by during receiving hours and offered to discuss an author whom he had been studying for years. When his host smiled upon hearing this author’s name—this happened every time—Torné-Chavigny was ready with a retort: “With a verse I will shake your skepticism and in five minutes I will make you believe in Nostradamus.” He then pulled out his old edition of the Prophecies and explained how quatrain 8.46—“Cock vs. eagle, three French brothers wait”—illuminated the fates of France’s recent kings. Having sowed doubt (or at least aroused curiosity) in his host’s mind, he pounced with one of the famed verses about Napoléon.

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