In addition to the legend of the Little Red Man and the consultation of Egyptian oracles, Napoleon also took a starring role in numerous prophecies. Indeed, prophecy became deeply engrained in accounting for Napoleon’s extraordinary destiny.
We can see this (retroactive) use of prophecy to explain Napoleon’s success in the two most influential sagas of Napoleonic Europe written during the nineteenth century; Tolstoy’s War and Peace and Stendhal’s The Charterhouse of Parma. In War and Peace, Pierre Bezukhov, using an esoteric number code he picked up from the Masons, translates Napoleon’s name as “666,” the beast foretold by the apocalypse. At the very beginning of Stendhal’s The Charterhouse of Parma, Stendhal depicts the surety of the entire Lombard aristocracy that Napoleon’s success in 1796 will be short-lived because of a prophecy made by the town’s patron saint that has been interpreted as giving him 13 weeks after victory of Marengo. Stendhal wryly remarks that when Napoleon’s successes continue thick and fast upon each other“ then the Lombard nobles, in the safe shelter of their castles, discovered that at first they had misinterpreted the prophecy of the holy patron of Brescia; it was a question not of thirteen weeks, but of thirteen months. The thirteen months went by, and the prosperity of France seemed to increase daily.”
Modern readers, if acquainted with the prophecies surrounding Napoleon at all, are probably most familiar with those of Nostradamus, who allegedly forecast Napoleon in the role of the “first Anti-Christ.” Yet there were many others. Indeed, one scholar named Henri Dujadin in the 1830s counted no fewer than 8 to 10 prophecies made between the 13th and 18th centuries which supposedly foretold the coming of Napoleon (these did not include the practical joke played by two professors in 1806 who claimed to have found new verses from Petronius and Catallus prophesying Napoleon’s rise to power). Of these prophecies, the three longest-lived were those of Noel or Philippe Dieudonne Olivarius from his Livres des Prophetics of 1542, those of the Solitaire d’Orval (often presumed to be Nostradamus and sometimes conflated with Olivarius – or there were sometimes said to be 2 or 3 different Olivarius brothers. It all got very confused), said to have written in 1544, and the dream of Frederick the Great of Prussia, which supposedly occurred in 1769.
At the center of much of this prophecy is one woman who has appeared before in the story, Marie Anne Adelaide Lenormand, often called Mademoiselle Lenormand. Perhaps the most famous fortune-teller in all of French history, she was an integral part of the Dark Side of the Enlightenment – where the eighteenth century quest for knowledge and science touched a Romantic impulsion towards the bizarre, mystical and occult. She is often credited with the creation of the modern deck of Tarot (although these were not in fact the cards she used, which seem to have been closer to playing cards). Mademoiselle Lenormand rose to prominence during Napoleon’s reign (although according to legend and her own account her psychic abilities had been consulted by the likes of Robespierre, Marat and Danton, whose early deaths she had forewarned). She was said to have become quite intimate with Empress Josephine, who was often portrayed as exceptionally superstitious, despite the fact that the Napoleonic Code made fortune-telling a crime somewhat along the lines of sabotaging public roads. She used a wide variety of divining tricks to foretell the future – ranging from cards and palm-reading to less conventional methods wherein she would feed grain to chickens and read out the future from the pattern of their movements. She also published many of her visions. Although the daughter of a provincial draper with a patchy education in a convent school, her books reveal at least some knowledge of Latin as well as a savvy if somewhat arcane knowledge of the complexities of the political life of her time. They also reveal a somewhat less savvy propensity for expressing her opinion in barely veiled allegories that must have fooled no one. Indeed, Lenormand was in and out of jail several times in her relatively long life, accused of crimes ranging from treason to witchcraft. Nevertheless, her legacy includes not merely the deck of cards which bear her name, but also significantly shaping of a certain version of the Napoleonic legend.
Lenormand has been previously mentioned as incorporating the “petit homme rouge” into her works, including her memoirs of the Empress Josephine – largely scurrilous – and Le Petit Homme au chateau du Versailles. Lenormand was also important for popularizing – and maybe even inventing – one of the sixteenth century prophecies concerning Napoleon, that of Olivarius, whose name was variously reported as Philippe Dieudonne and as Noel, supposedly a doctor, surgeon and astrologer, occasionally supposed to be Nostradamus, whose text, supposedly published in 1542, was subsequently and coincidentally lost, but not before it had been included in Mademoiselle Lenormand’s various books of prophecy (notably Mémoires historiques et secrets de l’impératrice Joséphine of 1820 and Le petit homme rouge au château des Tuileries of 1831) as an appendix. According to Lenormand’s account the book had been presented to Napoleon by Benedictine monks shortly after his coronation. Although Napoleon reassured Josephine that its contents were untrue he also kept a copy with him at all times.
Italy will see a supernatural being arise from kindred stock. This man will come, in his youth, out of the sea. He will adopt the language and the manners of the Celto-Gauls. While still young, and in spite of untold obstacles, he will have a brilliant career and will become a great commander. Years of arduous toil and struggle will follow. He will be constantly at war …. He will give laws to the Germans, end the chaos in Gaul, and finally be made king. Thereupon, he will assume the title of emperor.He will do great things for his realm, construct magnificent buildings, ports, canals, waterworks. He alone will accomplish as much as all the Romans. He will have two wives and one son. In his wars, his campaigns will lead him where the 55th parallel of latitude intersects with the 55th meridian. There his enemies will set fire to a great city. He will enter it with his soldiers and again leave the ruins. His men will have neither bread nor water. They will perish in the bitter cold.Finally this great man, deserted and betrayed by his friends, will be driven into his own capital by a great European army. Banished to an island not far from his native land, he will remain there with his followers for 11 months, after which he will again disembark on Gaulo-Celtic soil. Driven out by a European triple alliance in three and one-half months, he will be compelled to surrender his throne to the former king.”
You can see how this would have been a pretty damned amazing prophecy had it actually been made in 1542. Fabricated in 1820, it loses a bit of the wow factor. Nor were contemporaries unaware of the magical way in which such documents turned up only to be somehow lost again. Jacques-Paul Migne’s 1855 Encyclopédie théologique already cast doubt on the accuracy of both the Solitaire d’Orval and Olivarius, terming the latter a fabrication of Lenormand’s agile mind. Yet this did not stop various versions of these prophecies, but also versions of Napoleon reacting to these prophecies from surfacing in later works (in one, for example, he calls in an abbot to ask if religion requires that one listen to prophecy and the abbot tells him that “God has always spoken through prophets.”)
The prophecies of the Solitaire d’Orval, so-called because they were supposedly discovered in a monastery in Belgium during the French Revolutionary wars of 1793, had supposedly become known to the Emperor around the same period as Olivarius’s prophecies. Indeed, sometimes these prophecies, “written in 1544” were who had decided to keep them quiet. In reality, they first began to circulate in the Catholic royalist press – the Journal des Villes et des Campagnes, Propagateur de la Foi, Tablettes du chrétien and L’Invariable – in June 1839.
Then there is the last story, whose provenance seems even more difficult to track down and concerns a dream that Frederick the Great supposedly had in 1769 on the day Napoleon was born. The Cincinnati Lancet (of all places!) in 1894 reported:
The dates in this version are preposterously confused – Frederick II had been dead for 10 years by that time and Napoleon was well on his way to glory in the Italian campaign. In Luisa Muhlbach’s 1906 novel Napoleon and the Queen of Prussia gets the dates right but has Napoleon take great pride in the dream, seeing it as foretelling that he will torch the city of Potsdam “like a falling star.”
In the past three entries, I have discussed the full array of supernatural apocrypha that comprised a large – but largely unstudied – part of the Napoleonic legend in the nineteenth century, and which seems to have transcended national borders, being found in various forms in France, England, the United States, Germany and Russia. On one hand, such a singular individual as Napoleon – whose rise and fall seemed otherwise so phenomenal – must have been the beneficiary of magical powers, powers, that were firmly outside the reach of traditional Christianity, except for the tangential relationship of the “little red man” to Satan. On the other, perhaps the newspaper L’Ami de la religion et du roi: journal ecclésiastique, politique et littéraire put it best: “In times of troubles, crisis and revolution, people love to take refuge in the future and to console themselves by thoughts of better times. From this arises the disposition to welcome predictions which present themselves under more or less plausible appearances.” Yet, the journal warned, despite the fact that “even the most estimable men have given credence” to some of these beliefs, this did not make them correct. Humans ultimately must rely on their own senses in understanding the crazy and contingent flow of history in their lives.