Pierre Plantard

The teaching

Taught from the papers he and Philippe de Chérisey forged in the 1960s, read beside the record that exposes them.

A hoax, taught as a hoax

The story Plantard built is a hoax, and it is taught here as one: the claim as his papers tell it, part by part, with the plain fact beside each part. It is worth knowing whole, because it is the most successful forgery of a hidden order in modern times, and because it shows exactly how such a thing is made.

The Order of Sion

The papers tell that the crusader Godfrey of Bouillon founded an Order of Sion at Jerusalem in 1099, in the abbey of Our Lady of Mount Sion; that it raised the Knights Templar as its arm and parted from them in 1188 at Gisors in Normandy, in a quarrel marked by the cutting down of an elm; and that it has been ruled ever since by a line of grand masters, among them Nicolas Flamel, René of Anjou, Botticelli, Robert Fludd, Isaac Newton, Charles Nodier, Victor Hugo, Claude Debussy and Jean Cocteau.

The plain fact: the abbey of Mount Sion was real, a house of canons with no part in this story, and nothing records an Order of Sion of the kind the papers describe before the club Plantard registered in 1956. The list of grand masters was composed in the twentieth century out of famous names.

The lost kings

The second claim is a royal line. Dagobert II, a Merovingian king murdered in 679, is said to have left a son, Sigisbert, who was carried to safety in the south of France and became the ancestor of a hidden line running through Godfrey of Bouillon down to Plantard himself. The order's purpose, in the papers, is to guard that line and to restore it one day to the throne of France.

The plain fact: no source from the age of the Merovingians knows any such son or line. The genealogies were drawn up in the 1960s, and they end, as they were made to end, in Plantard.

The priest and the parchments

The third claim is a treasure. Bérenger Saunière, priest of the hilltop village of Rennes-le-Château in the 1880s and 1890s, is said to have found in a hollow pillar of his church parchments in Latin hiding coded messages: one saying that the treasure belongs to King Dagobert II and to Sion and that he lies there dead, another speaking of a shepherdess, of the painters Poussin and Teniers keeping the key, and of a demon guardian at noon. From what they led him to, the story goes, he grew suddenly rich.

The plain fact: Philippe de Chérisey made the parchments in the 1960s, copying a printed edition of the Latin gospels and working his ciphers into it, and he admitted it. Saunière's money came from selling masses by post, in numbers he could never have said, for which his bishop tried and suspended him.

The painting and the tomb

The fourth claim joins the treasure to art. Poussin's painting of shepherds reading the words Et in Arcadia ego on a tomb is said to hold the key, and a tomb by the roadside near Arques, which resembled the one in the picture, was offered as its model and the place of the secret.

The plain fact: Poussin painted an imagined Arcadia in the seventeenth century, and the tomb near Arques was built in the twentieth.

The changing story

A forger's story changes when it is pressed, and his did. In 1989 he gave the order a new beginning, founded not in 1099 but in 1681 at Rennes-le-Château, and named among its recent grand masters a businessman whose affairs were then before a judge. The judge called him in turn, and it was in that inquiry that he admitted the invention.

What the hoax teaches

The method is the lesson. The forgers placed their papers in the national library, so that they could be cited as found there; had friends write books that quoted them, so that each book seemed to confirm the others; hid the claims in ciphers and anagrams, so that every solver felt they had found something for themselves; and hung the story on real people, real places and real paintings, so that every true detail seemed to vouch for the false ones.

The test that undoes it is the plain one: ask where a paper was before it first appeared, and who first said it. The conspiracy art's branch Testing a claim teaches the questions.