Cazotte, Jacques

(1719–1792)

French author who foretold the Reign of Terror, the extremist phase of the French Revolution when thousands of political victims were guillotined.
As a writer, Cazotte is remembered chiefly for his supernatural fantasy Le Diable Amoureux (The Amorous Devil), which may have influenced a famous English Gothic romance, The Monk, by Matthew Gregory Lewis. Cazotte was reputed to have clairvoyant gifts. He flirted with occultism, but when the Revolution approached, he still had some Christian sympathies. In this respect, he differed from most of the French intelligentsia, who, thanks to Voltaire, had dropped Christianity and were anticipating the triumph of Reason.
The story of Cazotte’s prophecy is told by Jean de La Harpe, a critic and dramatist. His account is sometimes quoted as if it were all factual and proved. If that were so, Cazotte’s prophecy would be one of the most extraordinary on record. La Harpe recalls a dinner he attended in Paris early in 1788, a little over a year before the Revolution began. The many distinguished guests included the Marquis de Condorcet, a mathematician and political philosopher; Sébastien de Chamfort, a fashionable author; Félix Vicq-d’Azyr, the queen’s doctor; Chrétien de Malesherbes, a holder of important official posts; and Jean Sylvain Bailly, France’s leading astronomer. The most prominent socially of the ladies was the Duchesse de Gramont. Present also was Jacques Cazotte himself.
La Harpe’s narrative covers several pages; the following is a summary. After dinner, many of the guests chatted about their hopes for the coming Revolution, when superstition and fanaticism would give way to true philosophy. The reign of Reason was near, and it would be glorious. Cazotte dissented, speaking with a firmness and seriousness that attracted attention. The reign of Reason was coming, yes; there would even be temples of Reason. But the result would be terrible. Dreadful things would be done in the name of philosophy and liberty.
He made specific predictions for some of the guests, all of them alarming. Condorcet would be in peril of death; he would carry poison to cheat the executioner, and he would die on the floor of a prison cell. Chamfort would slash his wrists in despair. Vicq-d’Azyr would die similarly. Malesherbes and Bailly would perish on the scaffold, and so would two other guests whom Cazotte named. The Duchesse remarked that women didn’t seem to be in the same danger, but Cazotte said that women would suffer equally with men. All this would happen within six years.
La Harpe says in his account that he asked if Cazotte had any message for him. Cazotte told him that he would become a Christian believer. Since La Harpe was a convinced atheist, this sounded impossible. Cazotte, however, stood his ground. He went on to hint at

disaster for the queen, Marie Antoinette, and even for the king, Louis XVI. The host had been prepared to treat his performance as a joke, if in poor taste, but the mention of royalty threatened to get the company into trouble. Cazotte agreed to leave, but before doing so, he foretold his own death.
The Revolution broke out in 1789. Several of the dinner guests were active supporters. Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris was converted into a Temple of Reason, with an actress impersonating the Goddess of Reason. After a hopeful early phase, the atmosphere changed, and most of Cazotte’s words were precisely fulfilled. He was executed himself in September 1792 for involvement in a plot to rescue the king. Bailly was guillotined in 1793, and the others for whom Cazotte had foretold execution were guillotined the following year. Condorcet, Chamfort, and Vicq-d’Azyr died more or less as predicted. La Harpe was imprisoned. While in jail, he had a spiritual experience and became a firm supporter of Church and crown. He died in retirement in 1803. It is not known when he wrote his account of the dinner party or what, if anything, he intended to do with it. Left among his papers, it was published in 1806.
All the deaths undoubtedly happened, and so did the conversion. The question is whether Cazotte really predicted them, or whether La Harpe made the story up afterward for some purpose of his own which was not disclosed. A major objection is that it is too good in a literary sense. It is carefully crafted and dramatic and does not read like a memorandum written down when the memory was fresh. However, there are letters and memoirs attesting that La Harpe spoke of the prophecy during the years 1788 and 1792—that is, before the Terror—and that Cazotte sometimes mentioned it himself.
The Comtesse d’Adhémar, a lady in attendance at court who knew of Cazotte’s psychic reputation, was present at the dinner and wrote an account of it herself that confirms the main drift of the prophecy. Henriette-Louise, Baronne d’Oberkirch, has a reference to it in her memoirs. In January 1789, she mentions “the famous prophecy of Monsieur Cazotte,” citing an account written by La Harpe himself, which was passed on to her by a correspondent. An English investigator who started out as a skeptic found several people who knew of the prophecy, including Cazotte’s son Scévole, and he became convinced of its authenticity when they confirmed the story independently.
The testimonies converge. However, they are phrased in general terms. The gap in the evidence is the lack of details. Cazotte’s predictions to named individuals are found only in La Harpe’s full written account and in materials that could have been copied from it. The irreducible fact seems to be that while La Harpe doubtless drew on his imagination as well as his memory in telling the story, Cazotte did predict the Terror. That was remarkable enough. Many people saw the Revolution approaching, but Cazotte was exceptional and perhaps unique in anticipating the frightful phase through which it would pass.
It is easy to argue that he simply foresaw, by his own natural good sense, that the Revolution would (as the phrase goes) devour its children. The explanation, however, is a product of hindsight, in the light of what happened in Russia as well as France. In 1788, the prospects were different. There had been countless wars and persecutions, but the reign of Reason was expected to end such evils, and nothing like the revolutionary slaughter had ever been known. One French skeptic argued, long afterward, that it would not have been difficult for Cazotte to foresee the Terror. But if it was not difficult, others should have foreseen it too; and no one else did. The “rational” optimism of the time is shown in a popular fantasy, Louis-Sébastien Mercier’s L’An 2440 (The Year 2440), which portrayed an almost cloudless future and went into twenty-five editi
The difficulty of explaining Cazotte’s prophecy by ordinary foresight becomes greater when his own writings are taken into account. They show no trace of the rare acumen he would have needed or the plain political awareness—far from it. Le Diable Amoureux is about enchantments and supernatural beings, with no pretense of realism. When the Revolution was actually under way, Cazotte wavered. At first, he was mildly hopeful. Then, he moved into opposition. His royalist outpourings were utterly unrealistic, and they were not only unrealistic, they were absurd. He expected the king’s release from detention, if royalists did their duty with God’s help, and said the restored Louis would surpass the glories of Solomon and be a beacon for all Europe when the present troubles were over/ He even plunged into the book of Revelation, as so many cranks have, and gave parts of it wild interpretations in terms of current events.
His delusions led him to the scaffold, and he perished with dignity. They were delusions, nevertheless. If he had talked so foolishly at the dinner party, on any theme at all, the guests would have laughed and turned away, not gathered round him listening and questioning. The Cazotte whose “famous prophecy” was remembered and talked about has to have been, in effect, a different person from the Cazotte revealed in the writings. When all improbabilities are discounted, the case for some kind of inspiration, some unexplained intrusion into Cazotte’s mental processes, is still arguable.
In 1845, Gérard de Nerval, another writer of fantasy, brought out a short biography of him. In this, he gives “only relative credence” to the prophecy and agrees with the view that the Terror would have been easily foreseeable. Here, the wisdom of hindsight is becoming orthodoxy. However, he also draws attention to a strange passage in Ollivier, a narrative poem that Cazotte wrote in earlier days. He suggests that this may be a prophetic hallucination, its imagery anticipating the prophecy by many years.
The character who tells this part of the story is a woman traveling with a companion. The sinister “fay Bagassa” lures them by magic into her palace, where they fall down a pit and a machine cuts them to pieces, yet somehow they remain alive. The narrator finds that her separated head, the conscious part of her, has been ranged with 800 other heads, all of them alive as she is herself. They are bored and quarrelsome, complain of being without limbs, and have a bitter humor but evidently see no future. Nerval remarks that in the light of the happenings long afterward, this flight of fancy is curious. It is certainly odd that Cazotte, of all people, should have imagined a vast assembly of severed heads. When he wrote Ollivier, the guillotine was not even known in France. Mass decapitation by this method was a purely revolutionary phenomenon.
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