The inspiration for The Da Vinci Code

Comes from the kind of Frenchman the "reality-based community" swoons over.


Dan Brown begins The Da Vinci Code with a page labeled "Fact," on which he describes the Priory of Sion as "a European society founded in 1099, a real organization". The Priory is Brown's central focus of conspiracy, power, wealth, and historical significance; he based much of his "research" on the book Holy Blood, Holy Grail, in which supposedly long-undiscovered documents (Les Dossiers Secrets) reveal the history of this society and contain an actual list of the Priory's Grand Masters-including such men as Leonardo da Vinci, Sir Isaac Newton, and Victor Hugo.

In truth, the Priory was a club created in 1956 by Pierre Plantard, who later testified under oath that he had fabricated the entire hoax. [He was a] French fascist who did prison time for association with an anti-Semitic, anti-Masonic group called Alpha Galates; also did time for fraud and embezzlement. Plantard posed as an expert on the Knights Templar; when he was interviewed by the authors of Holy Blood, Holy Grail, his claims to be a Grand Master of the Priory of Sion were made public. These claims were based upon documents (called Les Dossiers Secrets, buried deep within the National Library in Paris) that were actually forged genealogies discreetly planted in such a way as to appear hidden. In 1993 Plantard confessed to having created both the documents and the entire Priory of Sion hoax.

Plantard and his friend Andre Bonhomme had organized the small group known as Priory of Sion, in 1956, to endorse affordable housing; they published a pamphlet entitled Circuit to promote their ideas. They abandoned their cause in 1957, and in the years after the breakup, Plantard created documents that would later be placed in the Bibliothèque Nationale as proof that a secret society guarded the identity of a royal bloodline, beginning with Mary Magdalene and Jesus and continuing through the French Merovingian kings to the present Saint-Clair family. The current descendants of Jesus supposedly included Plantard himself.

In 1989, Plantard revised some of the forged documents, adding to the list of Grand Masters the name of Roger-Patrice Pelat, a friend of French President Francois Mitterand. During a financial scandal involving Pelat, Plantard, called to testify, swore under oath that he had invented the Priory's entire history and existence.