Doomsayer from the Past

From the topless beaches of the Cote d'Azur to back packing trails in the Alps, French vacationers last week were enjoying the final moments of their summer holidays. An uncommon number of them, including President Franc,ois Mitterrand, seemed to have their noses buried in a book. The tome was France's latest rage, a 565-page edition of the apocalyptic predictions of Nostradamus, the Renaissance physician and astrologer. Noted the newsweekly Le Point in a cover story on the sudden French passion for bleak prophecies: "The man of this summer is not Mitterrand, but Nostradamus."

The latest of some 400 works on Nostradamus since his death in 1566, Jean-Charles de Fontbrune's Nostradamus--Historian and Prophet is an interpretation with a twist: De Fontbrune analyzed the use and frequency of words with the help of a computer in his translation from 16th century French. Nostradamus' predictions, originally titled Centuries, are contained in 1,050 verses, mostly quatrains. He is said to have conceived his vague but troubling visions while staring into a brass bowl filled with water; he is otherwise best known as Charles IX's doctor. Published in November 1980, De Fontbrune's book at first drew little attention. Then, last May, readers began to interpret the attempt on the life of Pope John Paul II in Rome as a fulfillment of Nostradamus' prophecy that a Pontiff would be assassinated ("Roman Pope do not approach the city which two rivers bathe/ Your blood and that of your followers will flow near this place when the rose will flower"). A rose? That had to refer to Mitterrand's election; after all, the flower is the symbol of the French Socialist Party. Within three months, Nostradamus had sold 232,000 copies.

The predictions of Nostradamus, whose significance is decidedly in the eye of the beholder, are to astrology as The Book of Revelation is to theology: they tend to be rediscovered during turbulent historical eras--such as now, when many Western Europeans are worried about faltering economies and superpower conflict. Among De Fontbrune's other interpretations of predictions: a new great war in 1999 (World War III?) after an earlier major conflict (World War II?), and the utilization of nuclear missiles ("After one great massing of soldiers, another greater one is prepared . . . one will see then fire in the sky coursing from a great missile"). Said Le Point: "Fear is becoming a market. One hundred days after having brought Mitterrand to power, our citizens are paying $20 a copy to shudder in horror."

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