Jacques Halbronn’s Theory

 

Abstract

Halbronn’s Researches are marked by a new methodology in three points.

1 the title of the editions does not necessarily correspond to their content.,

2 the dates of edition do not either correspond to the real time of publication

3 the author which is given is not necessarily the right one.

By doing that, Halbronn proposes a radically new approach of the Nostradamus corpus, of its chronology. He does not think that the Centuries were published during the life of Nostradamus and besides that Nostradamus is the author of the so called Centuries. Therefore, his chronology is the chronology of forgeries and it has to be established as such. Halbronn proposes several criteria of dating, two of them being the coronation of the French King Henri the 4th (1594) and the death of his son, Louis the 13th (1643). The time of the League is according to him the time when the centuries have been produced and published, that is not before the middle of the 1580s decade. He gives importance to IV, 46 as corresponding to Tours, which symbolises the enemy of the League, a quatrain not yet present in 1588’Rouen edition.. Just before that time, Halbronn sees a revival based on the re-edition of the quatrains of the almanacs, classified in “centuries”, one by year , those quatrains being not by Nostradamus either but by some secretary making verses from his prose predictions. Halbronn gives a great deal of importance to publications of the 17Ith Century, as the English translation of 1672, as the Antoine Besson (Lyon, circa 1691). He believes that their content corresponds to the first formulation of the Epistles to Cesar and to Henri the 2nd, which have been preserved. He underlines the fact that the very first edition of the prophetical quatrains was not organised in centuries (see Daniel Ruzo description of the 1588 Raphal du Petit Val edition, copy to day not available), which will show that the Macé Bonhomme 1555, divided in centuries, is by no means the first.For Hallbronn, the title “Grandes et Merveilleuses Prédictions” did not originally correspond to the same content as the title “Prophecies” but referred to a supposed commentary that Nostradamus would have made of the quatrains, century by century, as Halbronn understands from a compared study of the versions of the Preface to Cesar. Halbronn gives importance to the iconographic approach and shows that the images used for the 1555 and 1557 editions were taken, by mistake, by forgers from false editions images of his almanacs and do not correspond to the images of his authentic Prognostications that he did publish in the 1550s.