Pierre Plantard

Pierre Athanase Marie Plantard (born March 18, 1920 in Paris ; † February 3, 2000 ibid) was the originator of the modern legends about the Prieuré de Sion , a group with a supposedly long history that later published many books such as The Holy Grail and his Inheritance and sacrilege inspired.

From 1975 he used the surname Plantard de Saint-Clair , a compilation he came up with after a published interview with Jean-Luc Chaumeil in the magazine l'Ère d'Aquarius . The surname Saint-Clair was added to his own surname - this was the name of a noble family from the Gisors area that played a certain role in Plantard's private mythology as the alleged repository of a Templar treasure .

In the 1960s, Plantard worked with Gérard de Sède (1921-2004). Gérard de Sède popularized the legend of Rennes-le-Château by rewriting a Plantard manuscript that had not previously found a publisher. It was called L'Or de Rennes (1967) and was later republished under various titles such as Le Trésor Maudit de Rennes-le-Château and Signe Rose + Croix .

Young years

Pierre Plantard was born on March 18, 1920 to the butler Pierre Plantard and the cook Amélie Marie Raulo.

After leaving school in 1937, he started creating phantom societies with the aim of "purifying and renewing France". On December 16, 1940 Plantard wrote a letter to Henri Philippe Pétain , in which he expressed his belief in a "terrible Masonic and Jewish conspiracy" (see also: Protocols of the Elders of Zion ) against France and warned Pétain that he had to act quickly responded to this threat and offered him "a hundred reliable men ... who would have taken care of this matter."

Plantard's phantom societies included the Union Française (1937), the Renovation Nationale Française (1941) and the Alpha Galates (1942 and 1946). The German authorities refused Plantard permission to set up the Renovation Nationale Française . When he broke another ban in the case of the Alpha Galates , he negotiated a four-month stay in Fresnes prison .

The police files relating to Plantard's pre-war and wartime activities can be found in the Paris Police Station. During this time the following was recorded about him:

“Plantard, who boasts of having numerous political connections, seems to be one of those narrow-minded, arrogant young men who run more or less fictional groups to make them appear important and to interest young people in the current trend exploit them to attract government attention. "

- Police files on Plantard's renovation Nationale Française, May 9, 1941

Foundation of the Prieuré de Sion (1956)

In 1951 Plantard moved from Paris to Annemasse in Haute-Savoie in eastern France. At the time, Plantard was married and had a three-year-old daughter. In Annemasse he worked as a technical draftsman.

In 1953 he was sentenced to six months in prison for fraud and embezzlement.

Together with André Bonhomme, he founded the Prieuré de Sion association on May 7, 1956 , named after a small hill called “Mont Sion” outside Annemasse. The statutes and registration documents signed by both they deposited with the sub-prefecture of Saint-Julien-en-Genevois , in accordance with the French law for organizations of 1901, which officially required all companies to register. The Prieuré de Sion association was dedicated to the "defense and freedom of cheap accommodation" and supported the opposition candidate in local elections, published a magazine "Circuit" and had its headquarters at Plantard's home on Sous-Cassan. In this magazine, local building contractors were criticized and attacked. Sometime after October 1956 the association was disbanded after Plantard was sentenced to 12 months in prison for kidnapping minors.

Reactivation and consequential activities of the Prieuré de Sion

In the early 1960s, Plantard claimed the throne of France as an alleged Merovingian descendant of King Dagobert II . Prior to this there is no evidence that Plantard or his family claimed the inheritance of the Merovingian dynasty. He first got this idea through an article by Louis Saurel in the French magazine Les Cahiers de l'Histoire (1960 / No. 1). There Saurel argued that Dagobert II had effectively been the last independent king of the Merovingians before his caretaker seized power. The model of this article was incorporated into a 1964 Prieuré document entitled “Kings and Governesses of France”, which was attributed to an “Anne Lea Hisler”.

This period of Plantard's activities coincides with the meeting of the French author Gérard de Sède (de Lieux), who together with Plantard published the book Les Templiers sont parmi nous ( The Templars Are Among Us ) in 1962 . It referred to the story of Gisors (where a Templar treasure is said to be hidden), begun by Roger Lhomoy . At that time Lhomoy was working on a pig farm in de Sède.

The book seems to be the beginning of the later popular version of the Prieuré de Sion with the known components, for example, the Grand Master of the Prieuré de Sion, Gottfried von Bouillon, is mentioned. The various claims in the Prieuré documents were not mentioned in any form in any historical record prior to the early 1960s. Furthermore, reciprocal letters from Pierre Plantard, Philippe de Cherisey and Gerard de Sède from the 1960s prove that they were involved in a secret hoax describing plans for how criticism of their various claims should be met and how they would invent new claims, to keep things going. These letters (over 100) are in the possession of the French researcher Jean-Luc Chaumeil, who also keeps the original envelopes. Chaumeil was part of the intrigue surrounding the Prieuré de Sion in the 1970s and wrote books and articles on Plantard and the Prieuré de Sion before leaving. In the late 1970s, he revealed Pierre Plantard's past in his books.

From the mid-1960s, Plantard claimed that the Prieuré de Sion was a secret inner circle of the Templars who had survived the destruction of the original order and had manipulated events in Europe for centuries to keep the “rightful” Merovingian royal rule alive.

Influenced by the hotelier Noel Corbu, who claimed that the previous owner of his hotel, Pastor Bérenger Saunière, had found a treasure, Plantard claimed that this treasure contained parchments that would prove its origin from Dagobert II. Plantard wrote manuscripts and had parchments made by his friend Philippe de Cherisey, which Saunière allegedly found during the renovation of his church. These documents supposedly proved the survival of the Merovingian line of Frankish kings. To this end, Plantard manipulated Saunière's activities in Rennes-le-Château in order to prove his claims regarding the Prieuré de Sion. For this purpose, secret documents, hand-made with pencil, were deposited in the National Library in Paris.

Next life

In the late 1980s, Plantard changed his claims when he revised the mythological ancestry of the Prieuré de Sion and now claimed that it had nothing to do with the Knights Templar, that the dossiers secrets were written under the influence of LSD , and that the Prieuré de Sion was actually founded in Rennes-le-Château in 1681 by the grandfather of Marie de Negri d'Ables. This revised version of the Prieuré de Sion was influenced by the opening of the Saunière Museum in Rennes-le-Château in May 1989. The reason for this revision was not least the popularization that “his” secret society experienced through the book The Holy Grail and His Heirs . He tried to distance himself from the much more far-reaching theses of the three authors Lincoln, Baigent and Leigh, which Dan Brown processed in the novel The Da Vinci Code.

In September 1993 Plantard claimed that Roger-Patrice Pelat had once been the Grand Master of the Prieuré de Sion. Pelat was a friend of François Mitterrand (who was French President at the time) and the subject of a scandal involving French Prime Minister Pierre Bérégovoy . During the interrogation, Plantard testified under oath that the Prieuré de Sion did not exist and declared that he had invented everything, including Pelat's involvement with the Prieuré de Sion. A French court ordered a search of Plantard's house, in which the authorities found numerous "documents" from the Prieuré de Sion , including those that said Plantard was the "real King of France".

Plantard lived secluded in Paris until his death on February 3, 2000.

See also

• False Merovingians

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Police Report on 'French National Renewal' dated 9 May 1941 (English)
2. ↑ ^{a b} Paul Smith, " Pierre Plantard, Judge Thierry Jean-Pierre and the End of the Priory of Sion in 1993 " (English)