Madame Hisler undoubtedly intended this to be a glowing portrait. What emerges, however, is the sense of an individual more singular than anything else. In some places Madame Hisler’s language becomes both vague and hyperbolic. Moreover, the diverse people listed as M. Plantard’s distinguished acquaintances are, to say the least, a fairly odd lot.
On the other hand, M. Plantard’s contretemps with the Gestapo would point to laudable activity during the Occupation. And our own researchers eventually yielded documentary evidence. As early as 1941 Pierre Plantard had begun editing the resistance journal Vaincre, published in a suburb of Paris. He was imprisoned by the Gestapo for more than a year, from October 1943 until the end of 1944.27
M. Plantard’s friends and associates proved to include individuals rather better known than those listed by Madame Hisler. They included André Malraux and Charles de Gaulle. Indeed M. Plantard’s connections apparently extended well into the corridors of power. In 1958, for example, Algeria rose in revolt and General de Gaulle sought a return to the presidency of France. He seems to have turned specifically to M. Plantard for aid. M. Plantard, together with André Malraux and others, seems to have responded by mobilizing the so-called Committees of Public Safety—which played a critical role in returning de Gaulle to the Elysée Palace. In a letter dated July 29, 1958, de Gaulle personally thanked M. Plantard for his services. In a second letter dated five days later, the general requested of M. Plantard that the committees, having attained their objective, be disbanded. By an official communique in the press and on the radio, M. Plantard dissolved the committees.28
Needless to say, we became increasingly anxious, as our research progressed, to make M. Plantard’s acquaintance. There did not at first seem much likelihood of our doing so, however. M. Plantard appeared to be untraceable, and there seemed no way whereby we, as private individuals, could possibly locate him. Then, during the early spring of 1979, we embarked on another film about Rennes-le-Chateau for the BBC, which placed its resources at our disposal. It was under the auspices of the BBC that we at last managed to establish contact with M. Plantard and the Prieuré de Sion.
Initial inquiries were undertaken by an Englishwoman, a journalist living in Paris, who had worked on various projects for the BBC and had acquired an imposing network of connections throughout France, through which she attempted to find the Prieuré de Sion. At first, pursuing her quest through Masonic lodges and the Parisian esoteric "subculture," she encountered a predictable smoke screen of mysti- fication and contradiction. One journalist warned her, for example, that anyone probing Sion too closely sooner or later got killed. Another journalist told her that Sion had indeed existed during the Middle Ages but no longer did today. An official of Grand Loge Alpina, on the other hand, reported that Sion did exist today but was a modern organization—it had never, he said, existed in the past.
Threading her way through this welter of confusion, our researcher at last established contact with Jean-Luc Chaumeil—who had interviewed M. Plantard for a magazine and written extensively on Saunière, Rennes-le-Château, and the Prieuré de Sion. He was not himself a member of Sion, M. Chaumeil said, but he could contact M. Plantard and possibly arrange a meeting with us. In the meantime he provided our researcher with additional fragments of information.
According to M. Chaumeil the Prieuré de Sion was not, strictly speaking, a "secret society." It merely wished to be discreet about its existence, its activities, and its membership. The entry in the Journal Officiel, M. Chaumeil declared, was spurious, placed there by certain "defecting members" of the order. According to M. Chaumeil, the statutes registered with the police were also spurious, issuing from the same "defecting members."
M. Chaumeil confirmed our suspicions that Sion entertained ambitious political plans for the near future. Within a few years, he asserted, there would be a dramatic change in the French government—a change that would pave the way for a popular monarchy with a Merovingian ruler on the throne. And Sion, he asserted further, would be behind this change—as it had been behind numerous other important changes for centuries. According to M. Chaumeil Sion was antimaterialistic and intent on presiding over a restoration of "true values"—values, it would appear, of a spiritual, perhaps esoteric character. These values, M. Chaumeil explained, were ultimately pre-Christian—despite Sion’s ostensibly Christian orientation, despite the Catholic emphasis in the statutes. M. Chaumeil also confirmed that Sion’s grand master at that time was indeed François Ducaud-Bourget. When asked how the latter’s Catholic traditionalism could be reconciled with pre-Christian values, M. Chaumeil replied cryptically that we would have to ask the Abbé Ducaud-Bourget himself.
M. Chaumeil emphasized the antiquity of the Prieuré de Sion as well as the breadth of its membership. It included, he said, members from all spheres of life. Its objectives, he added, were not exclu- sively confined to restoring the Merovingian bloodline. And at this point M. Chaumeil made a very curious statement to our researcher. Not all members of the Prieuré de Sion, he said, were Jewish. The implication of this apparent non sequitur is obvious—that some members of the order, if not indeed many, are Jewish. And again we were confronted with a baffling contradiction. Even if the statutes were spurious, how could we reconcile an order with Jewish membership and a grand master who embraced extreme Catholic traditionalism—and whose close friends included Marcel Lefebvre, a man known for statements verging on anti-Semitism?
M. Chaumeil made other perplexing statements as well. He spoke, for instance, of the "Prince de Lorraine," who was descended from the Merovingian bloodline and whose "sacred mission was therefore obvious." This assertion is all the more baffling in that there is no known Prince of Lorraine today, not even a titular one. Was M. Chaumeil implying that such a Prince did actually exist, living perhaps incognito? Or did he mean "prince" in the broader sense of "scion"? In that case the present prince (as opposed to Prince) of Lorraine is Dr. Otto von Hapsburg, who is titular duke of Lorraine.
On the whole M. Chaumeil’s answers were less answers than they were bases for further questions—and our researcher, in the short time of preparation allowed her, did not know precisely which questions to ask. She made considerable headway, however, by stressing the BBC’s interest in the matter; for the BBC, on the continent, enjoys considerably more prestige than it does in Britain and is still a name to be conjured with. In consequence the prospect of BBC involvement was not to be taken lightly. "Propaganda" is too strong a word, but a BBC film that emphasized and authenticated certain facts would certainly have been attractive—a powerful means of gaining credence and creating a psychological climate or atmosphere, especially in the English-speaking world. If the Merovingians and the Prieuré de Sion became accepted as "historical givens" or generally acknowledged facts—like, say, the Battle of Hastings or the murder of Thomas à Becket—this would patently have been to Sion’s advantage. It was undoubtedly such considerations that prompted M. Chaumeil to telephone M. Plantard.
Eventually, in March 1979, with our BBC producer, Roy Davies, and his researcher functioning as liaison, a meeting was arranged between M. Plantard and ourselves. When it occurred, it had something of the character of a meeting between Mafia godfathers. It was held on "neutral ground" in a Paris cinema rented by the BBC for the occasion, and each party was accompanied by an entourage.
M. Plantard proved to be a dignified, courteous man of discreetly aristocratic bearing, unostentatious in appearance, with a gracious, volatile but soft-spoken manner. He displayed enormous erudition and impressive nimbleness of mind—a gift for dry, witty, mischievous but not in any way barbed repartee. There was frequently a gently amused, indulgent twinkle in his eyes, an almost avuncular quality. For all his modest, unassertive manner, he exercised an imposing authority over his companions. And there was a marked quality of asceticism and austerity about him. He did not flaunt any wealth. His apparel was conservative, tasteful, insouciantly informal, but neither ostentatiously elegant nor manifest
ly expensive. As far as we could gather, he did not even drive a car.
At our first and two subsequent meetings with him, M. Plantard made it clear to us that he would say nothing whatever about the Prieuré de Sion’s activities or objectives at the present time. On the other hand, he offered to answer any questions we might have about the order’s past history. And although he refused to discuss the future in any public statements—on film, for instance—he did vouchsafe us a few hints in conversation. He declared, for example, that the Prieuré de Sion did in fact hold the lost treasure of the Temple of Jerusalem—the booty plundered by Titus’ Roman legions in A.D. 70. These items, he stated, would be "returned to Israel when the time is right." But whatever the historical, archaeological, or even political significance of this treasure, M. Plantard dismissed it as incidental. The true treasure, he insisted, was "spiritual." And he implied that this "spiritual treasure" consisted, at least in part, of a secret. In some unspecified way the secret in question would facilitate a major social change. M. Plantard echoed M. Chaumeil in stating that, in the near future, there would be a dramatic upheaval in France—not a revolution, but a radical change in French institutions that would pave the way for the reinstatement of a monarchy. This assertion was not made with any prophetic histrionics. On the contrary, M. Plantard simply assured us of it, very quietly, very matter-of-factly—and very definitely.
In M. Plantard’s discourse there were certain curious inconsistencies. At times, for instance, he seemed to be speaking on behalf of the Prieuré de Sion—he would say "we" and thereby indicate the order. At other times he would seem to dissociate himself from the order—would speak of himself alone, as a Merovingian claimant, a rightful king, and Sion as his allies or supporters. We seemed to be hearing two quite distinct voices—which were not always compatible. One was the voice of Sion’s secretary-general. The other was the voice of an incognito king who "rules but does not govern" —and who regarded Sion as one might a sort of privy council. This dichotomy between the two voices was never satisfactorily resolved, and M. Plantard could not be prevailed upon to clarify it.
After three meetings with M. Plantard and his associates we were not significantly wiser than we had been before. Apart from the Committees of Public Safety and the letters from Charles de Gaulle, we received no indication of Sion’s political influence or power—or that the men we had met were in any position to transform the government and institutions of France. And we received no indication of why the Merovingian bloodline should be so important, or why its restoration should be taken any more seriously than the various attempts to restore any other royal dynasty. There are several Stuart claimants to the British throne, for example—and their claims, at least so far as modern historians are concerned, rest on a more solid basis than that of the Merovingians. For that matter, there are numerous other claimants to vacant crowns and thrones throughout Europe, and there are surviving members of the Bourbon, Hapsburg, Hohenzollern, and Romanov dynasties. Why should they be accorded any less credibility than the Merovingians? In terms of "absolute legitimacy" and from a purely technical point of view, the Merovingian claim might indeed take precedence. But the matter would still appear to be academic in the modern world—as academic, say, as a contemporary Irishman proving descent from the high kings of Tara.
Again we considered dismissing the Prieuré de Sion as a minor "lunatic fringe" sect, if not an outright hoax. And yet all our own research had indicated that the order, in the past, had had real power and been involved in matters of high-level international import. Even today there was clearly more to it than met the eye. There was nothing mercenary about it, for example, or exploitative in any way. Had M. Plantard so desired, he could have turned the Prieuré de Sion into an extremely lucrative affair—like many fashionable cults and sundry other "new age" institutions. Yet most of the seminal "Prieuré documents" remained confined to private printings. And Sion itself did not solicit recruits—not even in the way that a Masonic lodge might. Its membership, as far as we could determine, remained rigorously fixed at a precise number, and new members were admitted only as vacancies occurred. Such "exclusiveness" attested, among other things, to an extraordinary self-confidence, a certainty that it simply did not need to enroll swarms of novices—for financial gain or any other reason. In other words, it already "had something going for it"—something that seems to have enlisted the allegiance of men like Malraux and de Gaulle. But could we seriously believe that men like Malraux and de Gaulle were intent on restoring the Merovingian bloodline?
THE POLITICS OF THE PRIEURÉ DE SION
In 1973 a book was published entitled Les Dessous d’une ambition politique (The Undercurrents of a Political Ambition). This book, written by a Swiss journalist named Mathieu Paoli, recounts the author’s exhaustive attempts to investigate the Prieuré de Sion. Like us, M. Paoli eventually established contact with a representative of the order—whom he does not identify by name. But M. Paoli did not have the prestige of the BBC behind him, and the representative he met—if we can gauge by his account—would seem to have been of lesser status than M. Plantard. Nor was this representative as communicative as M. Plantard was with us. At the same time M. Paoli, being based on the continent and enjoying greater mobility than we do, was able to pursue certain leads and undertake "on the spot" research in a way that we could not. As a result his book is extremely valuable and contains much new information; so much, in fact, that it appeared to warrant a sequel, and we wondered why M. Paoli had not written one. When we inquired about him, we were told that in 1977 or 1978 he had been shot as a spy by the Israeli government for attempting to sell certain secrets to the Arabs.29
M. Paoli’s approach, as he describes it in his book, was in many respects similar to our own. He, too, contacted the daughter of Leo Schidlof in London; and he, too, was told by Miss Schidlof that her father, to her knowledge, had had no connection whatever with secret societies, Freemasonry, or Merovingian genealogies. Like our BBC researcher, M. Paoli also contacted Grand Loge Alpina and met with the lodge’s chancellor. And he, too, received a suspect reply. According to M. Paoli the chancellor denied all knowledge of anyone named Lobineau or Schidlof. As for the various works bearing the Alpina imprint, the chancellor asserted quite categorically that they did not exist. And yet a personal friend of M. Paoli’s, who was also a member of Alpina, claimed to have seen the works in the lodge’s library. M. Paoli’s conclusion is as follows:
9 The cover design of the novel Circuit
There is one of two possibilities. Given the specific character of the works of Henri Lobineau, Grand Loge Alpina—which forbids all political activity both within Switzerland and without— does not want known its involvement in the affair. Or another movement has availed itself of the name of the Grand Loge in order to camouflage its own activities.30
In the Versailles Annex of the Bibliothèque Nationale M. Paoli discovered four issues of Circuit,31 the magazine mentioned in the Prieuré de Sion’s statutes. The first one was dated July 1, 1959, and its director was listed as Pierre Plantard. But the magazine itself did not purport to be connected with the Prieuré de Sion. On the contrary, it declared itself the official organ of something called the Federation of French Forces. There was even a seal, which M. Paoli reproduces in his book, and the following data:
Publication périodique culturelle de la Federation des
Forces Françaises
116 Rue Pierre Jouhet, 116
Aulnay-sous-Bois—(Seine-et-Oise)
Tél: 929-72-49
M. Paoli checked the above address. No magazine had ever been published there. The telephone number, too, proved to be false. And all M. Paoli’s attempts to track the Federation of French Forces proved futile. To this day no information on any such organization has been forthcoming. But it would hardly seem coincidental that the French headquarters of the Committees of Public Safety were also at Aulnay-sous-Bois.32 The Federation of French Forces would thus appear to have been in some way co
nnected with the committees. There would seem to be considerable basis for this assumption. M. Paoli reports that Volume 2 of Circuit alludes to a letter from de Gaulle to Pierre Plantard, thanking the latter for his service. The service in question would seem to have been the work of the Committees of Public Safety.
According to M. Paoli most of the articles in Circuit dealt with esoteric matters. They were signed by Pierre Plantard—under both his own name and the pseudonym "Chyren"—Anne Léa Hisler, and others with whom we were already familiar. At the same time, however, there were other articles of a very different kind. Some of them, for example, spoke of a secret science of vines and viticulture— the grafting of vines—which apparently had some crucial bearing on politics. This seemed to make no sense unless we assumed that vines and viticulture were to be understood allegorically—a metaphor perhaps for genealogies, for family trees and dynastic alliances.
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