Pierre Plantard

Pierre Athanase Marie Plantard (March 18, 1920 – February 3, 2000) was a French draughtsman best known for being the principal perpetrator of the hoax of the Priory of Sion, which he established to manufacture evidence that he had a legitimate claim to the French throne. This deception later inspired a series of BBC Two documentaries, the 1982 pseudohistory book Holy Blood, Holy Grail and the 2003 novel The Da Vinci Code, among others.

He used an altered surname, Plantard de Saint-Clair, from 1975 onwards. The surname Saint-Clair was added to his own surname on the basis that this was the family name associated with the area of Gisors (in Normandy), a part of France associated with his hoax.

Early life

Plantard was born in 1920, in Paris, the son of a butler and a concierge. Starting in 1937, he began forming anti-Semitic and anti-Masonic associations with the aim of "purifying and renewing France". On December 16, 1940 Plantard wrote a letter to Marshal Pétain offering his services to the collaborationist government. His offer was investigated by both the French and German police, which found that Plantard's organization had at most 100 members.

Plantard's small associations included the French Union (1937), the French National Renewal (1941) and the Alpha Galates (1942). Alpha Galates published a periodical called Vaincre (Conquer), which was frequently laced with anti-semitic, anti-Masonic, and mystical nationalist views. The German authorities had refused permission for Plantard to form the French National Renewal.

In 1951, Plantard married Anne Léa Hisler (1930-1970). They moved to the town of Annemasse in south-east France, near the border with Switzerland. In 1953, Plantard was accused of selling degrees of esoteric orders for exorbitant sums and was given a six-month sentence for fraud.

Priory of Sion

Further information: Priory of Sion

On May 7, 1956, Plantard and others legally incorporated in the town of Annemasse a new group called the Priory of Sion. The Priory was devoted to the support of politicians working to build low-cost housing in Annemasse. It published a magazine named Circuit. The "Sion" in the name did not refer to Jerusalem but rather to a local mountain, Montagne de Sion, where the order intended to establish a retreat center.

Plantard was influenced by the story of hotelier Noel Corbu, who claimed in 1956 that a treasure had been discovered in the area of Rennes-le-Chateau by a previous occupant of his property, Father Bérenger Saunière, whilst renovating his church in 1891. Plantard met Corbu in the early 1960s and embellished the story with the claim that Saunière had discovered medieval parchments along with the treasure that made Plantard the last surviving Merovingian claimant to the throne of France, descended from King Dagobert II.

Plantard, together with his friend Philippe de Chérisey, produced a number of apocryphal documents, including one which attached Plantard's family tree to an actual genealogy from an article by Louis Saurel in the French magazine Les Cahiers de l'Histoire No. 1 (1960). Between 1965 and 1967 these documents, known as the Dossiers Secrets (Secret Files), were planted in the Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris. A third co-conspirator, French author Gérard de Sède (1921–2004), based his 1967 book L'Or de Rennes on these documents, "revealing" the Priory of Sion Rennes story to the world.

Massimo Intovigne states that Plantard, de Chérisey and de Sède later confessed in writing that the documents had been planted in the Bibliothèque nationale between 1965 and 1967 and were a "brilliant" hoax. Bill Putnam and John Edwin Wood, authors of The Treasure of Rennes-le-Chateau: A Mystery Solved, agree. When asked where to rank the Priory of Sion hoax among other hoaxes throughout history, both placed it "at the top."

French writer Jean-Luc Chaumeil inherited many of the papers of Plantard and de Chérisey. Among these papers were the Saunière parchments, which Chaumeil had analyzed by two experts, who found them to be around 40 years old. He also says that he has a handwritten document signed by de Chérisey calling the parchments "a good hoax."

Robert Richardson considers the ideas of Julius Evola (1898–1974) to be one of the possible sources for some of Pierre Plantard's claims.

Later life

In 1982, authors Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh and Henry Lincoln published Holy Blood Holy Grail. It became a bestseller and publicized Plantard's Priory of Sion story. The book added a new element to the story, the claim (based on the theories of French esoterist Robert Amberlain) that the Merovingian line of kings had actually been descended from Jesus Christ and Mary Magdalene, and that the purpose of the Priory (and its military arm, the Knights Templar) was to protect the secret of the holy bloodline.

Plantard played along with this story for a while, but in 1986 parted ways with Lincoln, dismissing Holy Blood, Holy Grail and even the 1960s documents as false and irrelevant. He revised his Priory of Sion story, dropping his earlier Merovingian claims and instead basing his main secret on the miraculous energy and powers of Rocco Negro, a mountain near Rennes-le-Chateau where he owned substantial property. Lincoln maintains that the story about Jesus, Mary Magdalene and the Merovingians might still be true even if Plantard's story was a fraud.

In a 1989 issue of Vaincre, Roger-Patrice Pelat was named as a grandmaster of the Priory of Sion. Pelat was a friend of the then-President of France François Mitterrand and center of a scandal involving French Prime Minister Pierre Bérégovoy. In October 1993, the judge investigating the Pelat scandal visited Plantard's home to question him and have his house searched. The search failed to find any documents related to Pelat. After also interviewing Plantard's son Thomas, the investigation of Plantard's connection with Pelat was closed.

After this, Plantard lived in obscurity until his death on 3 February 2000 in Paris.

Family

Thomas Plantard de Saint-Clair (born 1970) is the son of Pierre Plantard, the principal figure behind the creation of the Priory of Sion. Thomas Plantard de Saint-Clair was alleged to have taken over as Grand Master of the Priory from his father, according to a proclamation made by Pierre in 1989. At the time he was managing editor of the Priory's journal Vaincre. He has kept a very low profile since his father's death.

External links

• Chaumeil - Plantard, second part of an interview of Jean-Luc Chaumeil where he mentions his discovery of the bewitched hill and the owner of the abbé's estate, Henri Buthion, as well as his tumultuous relations with Pierre Plantard, Gérard de Sède and Mathieu Paoli