What kind of year will 2012 be? To be sure, for news junkies,
policy wonks, and the chattering class, it will be the year of
important elections in the U.S. and Europe, more financial
cataclysms, and the usual coups and earthquakes. But how will it be
for you personally? Will you win or lose a job? Get seriously ill?
Receive a surprise inheritance from a long-forgotten aunt in Texas?
Fall in love? Idle questions, you may say. But the better part of
60 million Frenchmen are convinced they already know how the year
will turn out for them.
From radio, television, and Internet horoscopes to specialized
astrology magazines, the French have been avidly pondering their
psycho-astrological portraits and long-term predictions for the New
Year. A cornucopia of confident forecasts for each of the 12 signs
of the zodiac is available for all of 2012. One of the best-selling
magazines proposes “an exclusive world-wide horoscope for a year
full of danger.” More optimistic ones promise “Happiness soon!” or
“Pleasant surprises all year long!” As one magazine editor
confides, “This time of year, sales jump by 20 percent when you put
a horoscope in the book.”
Many believers are making appointments with their usual
astrologers to get a jump on the New Year. How much they actually
depend on the Delphic, often contradictory predictions about the
sub-lunar world is imponderable. But the fact is that they are
willing to pay hard cash for them—upwards of $80 for a half-hour
chat with Magda, Luzitana, Samia, or Chandrane. Current queen of
the stars is the glam Elizabeth Teissier, who inaugurated TV
astrology in France in the 1970s after brief “careers” in modeling
and films. She claims a PhD in sociology from the Sorbonne and has
written several books on astrology. Her latest one covers
predictions for 2012–2016, “five years that will change the world.”
A safe enough prophecy, even without the fearsome dissonance she
detects between Uranus and Pluto.
The French passion for astrology cuts across class lines, from
concierges to government ministers and human resource managers of
big companies. Some of the latter have fired their in-house
psychologists and hired astrologers, convinced that a study of the
stars is as valid as looking at Rorschach ink spots to see if a new
executive will fit in with the corporate culture. That attitude is
consistent with the French rejection of most of 20th-century
psychiatric theory, starting with Freudianism. While a minuscule
minority has gone in for psychoanalysis, most Frenchmen have other
ideas of what a couch is for. And if they want to pay to talk about
their unhappiness, they prefer to base the conversation on the
heavens rather than on toilet training.
Nor is this proudly Cartesian nation bothered by the hobgoblin
of a foolish consistency. Isn’t it irrational to believe that the
position of celestial bodies at the hour of their birth somehow
determines their character and influences the course of their
lives? Do they notice that such credulity is paradoxical, to say
the least, in the skeptical land of the Enlightenment and the
culture that coined the term “intellectual”? Such naive questions
will get you a head-shaking look of pity and a large, indifferent
shrug.
Those new to Paris dinner parties are often surprised to see
that they feature less rarified political and philosophical
discussions than the ritual question with the first course,
“Quel est votre signe?” He who
cannot reply to his table companion with his zodiac sign, its
ascendant and descendent in his seventh house, is an instant
wallflower. Or worse, someone who is not quite comme il faut. “You can’t really get to
know someone without their astrological portrait,” a French widow
of my acquaintance, a Scorpio, told me. “If I ever considered
remarrying, I wouldn’t make a move without consulting my
astrologer. In any case I know I couldn’t get along with a
Libra.”
This often leaves foreign observers, including this one,
nonplussed. But the French can point to a long tradition of
soothsaying going back to the Middle Ages and Renaissance.
Strangely, most of their great cathedrals have astrological
symbols incongruously sculpted into their columns and porticos and
illuminated in their stained glass windows, right along with images
of Jesus, the Virgin Mary, and the saints. The famous seer of the
Renaissance, Provence-born Michel de Nostredame, called
Nostradamus, was known in the 16th century as now for his book of
predictions, Les Propheties,
published in 1555 and still in print. He was a regular at the court
of Catherine de Médicis, queen consort of King Henri II, where he
served as official astrologer. To this day many Frenchmen believe
he foretold historical events like the reign of Napoleon. They
continue to scrutinize his cryptic writings for clues to the
future.
But a century after Nostradamus, French astrology fell on hard
times. It does, after all, suggest a mechanistic universe, our
futures determined by the planets, leaving little room for free
will. The Catholic Church attacked it for this reason and Colbert,
the energetic chief minister of Louis XIV, banned it 1666.
Luminaries like La Fontaine, Voltaire, and Diderot fulminated
against “charlatans who make horoscopes.” Astrology went into
eclipse in France, only to shine again in the 20th century,
tolerated, along with other concessions to human foibles, like
gambling and prostitution.
Until astrology joined the computer age, the French made do with
horoscopes in newspapers and magazines, along with the daily
predictions broadcast every morning by major radio stations. Those
who could afford it preferred a long, confidential chat with the
likes of the felicitously named Madame Soleil—her real name. So
popular was she that her clientele ranged from veteran Communist
Party members to priests, along with a sampling of politicians and
cabinet members. The political traffic in her salon got so heavy
that, to avoid conflict, she had to reserve certain days for
right-wingers and others for the left.
FRENCH ASTROLOGY WENT DIGITAL in the 1960s with something called
Astroflash, the brainchild of a supermarket chain. It would be good
marketing, they thought, to offer their starry-eyed customers
computerized horoscopes. It became so popular that they opened a
boutique in a mall on the Champs-Elysées. The computer, duly
informed of place, date, and hour of birth, pumped out up to 500
personalized horoscopes a day at about $15 a shot. It is claimed
that one of those was for a certain Charles de Gaulle, but it
strains credulity to think the outrageously self-assured general
needed that crutch to find out who he really was and how best to
annoy les américains that
day.
The Internet and e-mail have given the French still other ways
to satisfy their insatiable craving for this stuff. Today astrology
sites get more hits than any others in the country. In addition,
more than a million subscribers receive their horoscope by e-mail
every morning, to read along with their café au lait and croissant.
In the land of toujours
l’amour, one site has spun off a television channel
programming not only hourly horoscopes, but also a “lovescope” and
“Eroscope,” the latter titillation viewable only after
midnight.
French astrologers are being coy about how Nicolas Sarkozy, an
Aquarius, will do in the 2012 election next April. “His
astrological theme is very ambivalent,” says Elizabeth Teissier
with Delphic prudence. “It shows a big change coming up in his
life, but its exact nature is unclear. Besides,” she confesses with
candor unusual in her profession, “elections are always
unpredictable.”
But other astrologers, while leaving plenty of latitude for
interpretation, consider the omens tolerably good for Sarkozy. “You
will benefit from good professional protection that will guarantee
job stability for the long term,” says one, “and you will be able
to consolidate your career.” That should help him decide to declare
his candidacy, which all France awaits with bated breath as the
Nouvelle Année begins.
