In 1789, the year the French Revolution began, the almanac market in France was enormous. Almanacs — annual publications containing a calendar, astrological predictions for the coming year, medical advice, agricultural timing, and miscellaneous practical information — were among the most widely read publications in France, distributed across every region of the country, consulted by readers from the literate working class through the middle bourgeoisie.
The almanac tradition went back centuries. Astrologers competed for the lucrative market of annual predictions, and the accuracy or inaccuracy of their predictions was remembered — at least by their readers, if not always by historians. In the years leading up to 1789, the most prominent French almanac publishers were producing predictions of notable instability and disruption, predictions that — read in retrospect — look prescient even accounting for the hindsight bias that inevitably shapes such readings.
Understanding what was actually predicted, and by whom, requires engaging with primary sources that most histories of the Revolution don’t consult, partly because historians of political upheaval don’t typically read almanacs, and partly because the relationship between astrological prediction and historical event is methodologically uncomfortable territory.
The Astrological Context: Saturn, Jupiter, and Upheaval
The major astrological event of the late 1780s that drew attention from serious practitioners was the conjunction of Saturn and Jupiter, which occurs roughly every twenty years and has been associated since classical antiquity with major political and social changes.
The Saturn-Jupiter conjunction of 1782–1783 occurred in Sagittarius — a sign associated in the mundane astrological tradition (the branch dealing with nations, rulers, and political events) with foreign affairs, philosophy, religion, and the questioning of established authority. The subsequent separation of the two planets and their movement through the late 1780s provided practitioners who were watching these cycles with a framework for expecting significant change in the period approaching 1789.
Mundane astrology — as practiced in France in this period — had a substantial tradition behind it. The conjunction cycles of Saturn and Jupiter had been used to time significant political events at least since the medieval Islamic astrological tradition that transmitted to European practice through works like those of Abu Ma’shar, whose writings had been circulating in Latin translation since the twelfth century. French practitioners working in the 1780s were drawing on a sophisticated body of interpretive tradition.
Jean-Baptiste Morin de Villefranche’s Legacy
Jean-Baptiste Morin de Villefranche, who died in 1656, was arguably the most serious astrological theorist France had produced — an astronomer and mathematician who spent thirty years developing a systematic reform of astrological technique in his massive Astrologia Gallica, completed just before his death. Morin’s system was rigorous, demanding, and explicitly aligned with a natural philosophy that tried to situate astrological effects within an account of causal mechanisms.
Morin is relevant to the Revolution not because he predicted it — he died 133 years before it — but because his methodological legacy shaped the serious practitioners who were active in the 1780s. French astrological practice in this period was not exclusively the popular almanac astrology of the market stalls; it included a serious scholarly tradition that drew on Morin’s methods and that maintained a different level of technical sophistication from the crowd-pleasing annual predictions.
The practitioners working in this tradition were the ones who produced the more specific and technically grounded predictions of major change in the late 1780s.
The Almanac Predictions: What Was Actually Said
The popular almanac predictions of the 1780s are difficult to evaluate with precision because the surviving copies are scattered across French regional archives and the predictions themselves are expressed in the generic language of the genre — sufficiently broad to fit a range of outcomes, but clearly oriented toward disruption and change.
What the almanacs of 1787 and 1788 consistently described was a period of exceptional difficulty for France, particularly for the monarchy and the established aristocratic order. The language of “great changes in the state,” “troubles of considerable magnitude,” and “the overthrow of those in high places” runs through multiple competing almanac publications of the period.
This consistency is worth noting. If multiple independent practitioners, working from the same astrological data (which was publicly available through published ephemerides) and producing competing publications, all arrived at broadly similar predictions of major disruption, it suggests at minimum that the astrological framework they were applying was pointing them in the same direction.
Whether it was pointing them accurately — whether the celestial configuration of the late 1780s genuinely indicated revolutionary upheaval, or whether the predictions were generic enough to fit almost any major development — is the persistent methodological question.
Jean-Louis Cotte and the Scientific Astrologer
One of the more interesting figures in this story is Jean-Louis Cotte, a meteorologist and naturalist who had been elected to the Académie Royale des Sciences and who maintained a serious interest in the relationship between celestial configurations and terrestrial events, particularly weather.
Cotte represents a transitional figure: he was a member of the scientific establishment and would not have described himself as an astrologer, but he maintained the project of correlating celestial events with terrestrial patterns that had been the intellectual core of astrology before the disciplinary split that placed meteorology in natural philosophy and astrology outside it.
His publications in the 1780s, which dealt primarily with weather prediction and its relationship to astronomical cycles, included material on the likely conditions of the coming years that overlapped significantly with what the popular almanac astrologers were predicting through explicitly astrological frameworks. The convergence is suggestive: different practitioners, working from different theoretical frameworks but looking at the same celestial data, were producing similar assessments of an unusually turbulent period approaching.
The Practitioners Who Named It
Three figures stand out in the record of explicit pre-revolutionary astrological prediction, though the documentation varies considerably in quality.
Etteilla (Jean-Baptiste Alliette, 1738–1791) was the most prominent French cartomancer of the period — a card-reader and esoteric writer who published extensively and had a substantial popular following. Etteilla’s predictions in the late 1780s, based primarily on Tarot rather than formal astrology, described a period of sweeping destruction of the old order followed by a new foundation. His publications, which remain in print in the esoteric tradition, are often cited as remarkably prescient about the Revolution’s character if not its specific events.
The difficulty with Etteilla’s case is the standard one: the predictions are published in the years immediately preceding the Revolution, but their language is general enough that any major political disruption would have counted as confirmation. The Revolution, when it came, was dramatic enough that virtually any prediction of “great change” would have appeared vindicated.
Louis-Claude de Saint-Martin (1743–1803), the philosopher sometimes called “the Unknown Philosopher,” occupied a position in French intellectual life that straddled Enlightenment rationalism and the esoteric tradition. His contacts with Freemasonry and with the Martinist tradition gave him access to networks of esoteric practitioners, and his published writings in the 1780s describe an approaching period of radical transformation in terms that his contemporaries read partly as spiritual prophecy and that later readers have read partly as political prediction.
Saint-Martin himself was cautious about the Revolution when it came — not entirely unsympathetic to its principles but appalled by its violence. His case illustrates the difficulty of connecting pre-revolutionary prediction to post-revolutionary reality: the prediction was general enough to fit the event, but the event, in its specifics, exceeded or diverged from anything the prediction had named.
Jean-Louis Carra (1742–1793) was a journalist and political activist who was executed during the Terror — which makes him one of the more poignant figures in this story, a man who predicted revolutionary upheaval and was eventually consumed by it. Carra published astrological almanacs in the 1780s under the title L’Astrologue français that made explicit claims about the coming period of political transformation. His predictions, compared against the actual trajectory of the Revolution, show a mixed record — accurate in predicting major change, significantly off in predicting that the change would lead relatively quickly to a stable new order.
Carra’s fate is a reminder that predicting revolution is not the same as predicting its specific character, its duration, or its eventual outcome. The astrologers who saw major disruption coming were right about the disruption. They were largely wrong about what it would look like from the inside.
The Revolution’s Own Relationship to Astrology
The Revolution’s attitude toward astrology was complex and ultimately hostile. The rationalist Enlightenment tradition that shaped the Revolution’s ideology was explicitly anti-superstition, and astrology was specifically identified as a superstition to be overcome.
The Revolutionary government attempted to reform the calendar entirely — the Republican Calendar introduced in 1793 replaced the Gregorian calendar with a rational decimal system, renaming the months for natural phenomena and eliminating the seven-day week (and with it, Sunday) in favor of a ten-day décade. The reform was motivated partly by anti-clericalism and partly by a genuine Enlightenment belief that a rational calendar would support a rational society.
The Republican Calendar survived until 1805, when Napoleon — who had by then consolidated power and needed to maintain peaceful relations with the Church — abolished it and restored the Gregorian calendar. The almanac tradition, which had been suppressed or transformed during the radical phase of the Revolution, revived with it.
The astrologers who had predicted the Revolution were thus faced with a government that considered their practice a relic of the old regime they had predicted the end of. Several found themselves in the uncomfortable position of having been right about the upheaval and unwelcome by the new order their predictions had heralded.
What the Episode Actually Shows
The French Revolution’s astrological history is instructive in several ways that go beyond the simple question of whether the predictions were accurate.
The convergence of multiple independent practitioners on broadly similar predictions of disruption in the late 1780s is a data point worth taking seriously, even accounting for the generality of the predictions and the hindsight advantage of readers comparing predictions to outcomes. The astrological framework, applied by serious practitioners to publicly available celestial data, consistently indicated a period of major change — and a period of major change arrived.
This is not proof of astrology’s validity. It is consistent with several interpretations: that the astrological framework tracked something real about cycles of political tension and change; that the predictions were general enough to fit almost any major development and the Revolution happened to be major; that the practitioners’ knowledge of France’s political situation, embedded in their social networks, contributed to predictions that were as much sociological as astrological.
The Revolutionary government’s hostility to astrology — and the practitioners’ difficult relationship with the new order they had heralded — is a minor historical irony with a larger resonance. The same forces that dismantled the ancien régime that astrology had been used to serve also dismantled the institutional frameworks within which astrology had operated. The rationalist revolution was, among other things, a revolution against the world in which almanac astrology was a serious mode of political intelligence.
What replaced it — the weather forecast, the economic indicator, the political poll — shares more with the almanac tradition than the Enlightenment would have liked to acknowledge. The project of reading patterns in available data to anticipate the near future is as old as human civilization. Its specific instruments change. The underlying project does not.
The three astrologers who predicted the French Revolution were doing what the practitioners before them had always done: watching the available signals, applying an inherited framework for reading them, and producing assessments of what was coming. Whether the framework they were using was valid is a question that the Revolution’s outcome didn’t definitively answer. What the outcome demonstrated is that something major was coming — and that, at least, they had gotten right.