Voodoo Histories: The Role of the Conspiracy Theory in Shaping Modern History (35 page)

Unfortunately, no publisher could be found who wanted to buy Plantard’s book; perhaps it was too badly written. But Plantard did have one acquaintance, Gérard de Sède, who could turn a word. In 1967, de Sède’s
L’Or de Rennes
appeared in print. The contract for the book included Philippe de Cherisey, entitling him to a share of what the book might earn. Extant from this period, there are dozens of letters exchanged between Plantard, de Cherisey, and de Sède detailing the progress of the hoax and discussing strategies for how to deal with the inevitable refutations of their stories .
¹⁷
One of the elaborations was to construct a history and a role for Plantard’s fictitious Priory, and deposit that, too, in the Bibliothèque Nationale. There it lay, awaiting discovery by Henry Lincoln, intrigued by the de Sède book, indulged by the BBC, and conned by the French hoaxers.

All this was revealed in 1983—so, not long after the publication of
The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail—
by Jean-Luc Chaumeil, a journalist on the fringe of the Priory hoaxers who still has the letters and a forty-four-page confession to forgery given to him by Philippe de Cherisey. Chaumeil’s accusations were borne out in this country by researchers such as Paul Smith, Robert Richardson, and the BBC producer Henry Cran, who all did what the original
Chronicle
team so signally failed to do, and checked the Priory story out. Cran, in the BBC’s 1996
Timewatch
program “The History of a Mystery,” even managed to trace the Plantard line back to the sixteenth century, where they found a peasant who grew walnuts.

It was all a hoax, every bit of it. It began with a story, which then developed into a massive fantasy, support for which was manufactured by forging documents. Many of these were lists of names copied from other genealogies and registers, and then tinkered with; others were invented travelogues. The motives of the participants varied. De Cherisey was interested in surrealism and in the 1960s was involved in an organization called the Workshop for Potential Literature (Oulipo), in which the members played around with puzzles, ciphers, and codes. Plantard, as we have seen, had been trying most of his life to give himself some significance through shadowy or secret organizations, joining the many people through the centuries who have been attracted to the idea of membership in a clandestine society with elite, and sometimes occult, powers to organize the world. Finally, there were those motivated simply by money.

And one can only imagine their enjoyment at playing Lincoln along, constructing a clue here, suggesting an answer there, and perhaps wondering how on earth their deception managed to keep the BBC man and his associates in programming for the best part of a decade. Eventually, however, even Plantard exhausted his capacity for invention, admitting under oath in the mid-1990s that the entire business had been a fraud. When Plantard died in 2000, almost everyone who had followed the story knew that the world had just lost one of its more harmless and entertaining con artists. Everyone, that is, except Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh, and Dan Brown.

Plantard’s Willing Victims

As for Henry Lincoln, in 2004 he told an interviewer that the late Pierre Plantard was so inscrutable and unreadable that he would have made a wonderful poker player. “In fact,” he went on, almost vehemently, “we don’t know anything about Bérenger Saunière the priest, we don’t know anything about Pierre Plantard, we don’t know anything about the Priory of Sion. We
know
almost nothing. That’s the word. The demonstrable facts are very few. All the rest is hearsay evidence, guesswork, and interpretation. None of the books written, including my own, have any validity whatsoever.”
¹⁸
Though his words are revealing, Lincoln was quite wrong. By the time he gave this interview, we knew a great deal. In fact, we knew categorically that the Priory didn’t exist and that the documents were a con. But what we now want to know—for the purposes of this book—is whether the
Holy Blood
team were themselves the innocent (if materially enriched) victims of a hoax, or whether they effectively agreed to be deceived, or whether they were in some way complicit in the deception.

Chaumeil’s own book exposing the Priory scam went to press after the last of the
Chronicle
programs in 1979 but before
The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail
appeared in 1982. Chaumeil told Channel 4 television that he had alerted the
Holy Blood
trinity to the fact of the scam up to a year before they completed their book. This allegation was subsequently put to Michael Baigent by the actor and TV historian Tony Robinson. Was it true? “I don’t recall that,” replied Baigent, adding, almost surreally, “but then Chaumeil was never necessarily very close to the inner groups of the Priory.” Robinson persisted. How did Baigent respond to Chaumeil’s revelation that the Priory was a surrealist fantasy?

BAIGENT:
He’s wrong.

ROBINSON:
Why are you so sure that he’s wrong?

BAIGENT:
Because I’ve seen the documents, I’ve researched them, I spent six years looking at the Priory and I’m satisfied that the Priory existed.
¹⁹

Baigent’s claim is, and always has been, that his team checked all the information it was given, and that, “in the end everything we could check proved accurate.” This checking must, at the very least, have been carried out in the most forgiving way, since by 1993 everyone involved at the French end of the Priory had admitted that it and its documents were fraudulent. In the afterword to the 1996 edition of
The Holy Blood,
its authors argued that they “granted a novelist might fabricate a comparable precision. But M. Plantard had no aesthetic justification for doing so. Neither did he stand to gain financially or in any other way. In the absence of any plausible reason for fabrication, we had no reason to doubt his word.”
²⁰
In their inverted world, Leonardo and Jean Cocteau could easily be guarding the Merovingian bloodline, but Pierre Plantard really couldn’t be an impostor.

They had an almost heroic way of fending off evidence of the Priory’s real origins. This is how they put it in
The Messianic Legacy
published in 1987. One wonders if their counsel had read this passage before the Dan Brown trial.

Nothing appeared straightforward; nothing could be taken at face value; everything had an alternative explanation. The Prieure de Sion had begun to seem to us like a holographic image, shifting prismatically according to the light and the angle from which it was viewed. From one perspective it appeared an influential, powerful and wealthy international secret society, whose members included eminent figures in the arts, in politics, in high finance. From another perspective it seemed a dazzlingly ingenious hoax devised by a small group of individuals for obscure purposes of their own. Perhaps, in some fashion, it was both.
²¹

And perhaps Lincoln, Baigent, and Leigh are, in some fashion, a group of Zulu women from the high veld. My instinct is that Baigent’s background heavily influenced his thinking. His personal history suggests someone rejecting the Establishment of his childhood, looking for other spiritual keys to unlock the world and thinking, for a time at least, that he has discovered them. He was brought up in an intensely Catholic family in New Zealand, attending church three times a week and given private tuition in Catholic theology from the age of five. In partial rebellion, the young Baigent looked for his own answers, attending, in turn, “every Christian church in our town, including Methodist, Anglican, Presbyterian, and Mormon churches.” At university, he changed from a science degree to comparative religion. He then joined a Christian Kabbalah group called the Builders of Adytum. By 1976, he was in London, sharing a flat in north London with Richard Leigh, through whom, as we’ve discovered, he was drawn into the Henry Lincoln
Chronicle
series. By then working as a photographer, Baigent sold his cameras and worked night shifts at a soft-drinks factory so that he could afford to be involved in the Priory research. “With hindsight,” he said in his court deposition, “I became obsessed with it.”
²²

Obsession occurs again in relation to Baigent. The skeptic Paul Smith visited him in Winchester in early 1993. “I found him very hospitable,” wrote Smith, “courteous to talk with, but still believing in the Priory of Sion, in Merovingian Bloodlines existing to the present day, and his Line of David obsession was evident.” Smith discovered that among Baigent’s papers were several effectively proving the Saunière story was a myth. The problem was that this evidence, Smith thought, lay “in the possession of somebody who did not know how to use it properly because they preferred to pursue non sequiturs relating to pseudo-history.”
²³

In short, arguably Baigent had looked the other way because he had found what he always wanted to find. He interpreted every bit of evidence in favor of his heart’s desire and discounted every objection. In the mid- 1990s, recalled Matthew d’Ancona, later editor of the
Spectator
, a lunch took place at L’Amico, a restaurant in central London. On one side was “a motley right-of-center bunch” all of whom were unhappy with Britain’s being part of the European Union, and on the other a couple of “men who don’t get out very much”—Baigent and Leigh. “What they wanted to know,” said d’Ancona, “was this: had we Euroskeptics ever come across anything, well, peculiar? Did we ever get the strangest, tingly feeling that Europe’s covert intention was not so much to . . . establish a federal superstate, but—for instance—to restore the bloodline of Jesus?” They were genuinely searching, he thought, for the Holy Blood and the Holy Directive.
²⁴

The overwhelming desire to believe is one explanation. But Henry Lincoln, one suspects, has probably known for many years that the Priory story is nonsense. Like
Doctor Who
or the
Curse of the Crimson Altar
, perhaps it was fun, and the money turned out to be even better. Or was it that, as a faux archaeologist, Lincoln achieved fame and popularity that even writing
Emergency Ward 10
had not provided? Or maybe he was simply entranced by a great story, and the historical truth of the matter was never as important to him? In one of his myriad post-
Da Vinci Code
appearances, Lincoln agreed that the Priory documents “are proof of absolutely nothing, beyond the fact that they have been written.” In fact, all documents of all kinds, he says, are like this.
²⁵
Nothing is better than anything else, and in history, as in novels, nothing is real, so there’s nothing to get hung up about. Or is there?

The Hidden-Hand Redux

One of the great early figures of conspiracism was a nineteenth-century French priest, the Abbé Barruel. Appalled by the French Revolution, Barruel decided that Jacobinism, and indeed most of the ills of the world, were the product of a great, historic plot. For Barruel, as Norman Cohn put it, “A revolutionary conspiracy has existed down the ages, from Mani to the medieval Templars and thence to the Freemasons. As for the Jews, he believed them to have made common cause with the Templars.”
²⁶

Readers of
The Holy Blood
have, in a reduced fashion, bought into Barruel’s view of history. True, there is no blaming of the Jews in the work of Lincoln, Baigent, and Leigh; what there is instead is an adaptation, for their own purposes, of the
Protocols of the Elders of Zion
. The
Holy Blood
authors agree that the
Protocols
, “at least in their present form,” are a forgery, and that their object was to incriminate the Jews, but—and it’s obvious a “but” is coming—“The 1884 copy of the Protocols,” the authors state, “surfaced in the hands of a member of the Masonic lodge.” (This was, as we have seen, an allegation first made by “Gottfried zur Beek,” in reality Captain Ludwig Müller von Hausen, in 1919, but for which there was no evidence whatsoever.)

Furthermore, according to Lincoln, Baigent, and Leigh, Maurice Joly, the originator of the dialogues on which the
Protocols
were partly based, “is said to have been a member of a Rose-Croix order.”
²⁷
Said by whom?

Then comes the point at which the authors have been driving. “Modern scholars have dismissed them as a total forgery . . . and yet the
Protocols
themselves argue strongly against such a conclusion.” This is because there was an original text on which the
Protocols
were based, which was, they argue, authentic and issued from the Masons. This “may well have included a program for gaining power, for infiltrating Freemasonry.”
²⁸
As we’ve seen, Joly’s original text was a satire on Napoleon III, and was crudely altered by Rachkovsky and his acolytes to fit the Jews instead. The idea that such an absurd plan for world domination actually existed, but for another group altogether, is really only slightly better than the original libel.

But the desire to “reclaim” the
Protocols
does reveal something about the eternal appeal of the hidden-hand theory—the idea that history is guided by secret organizations, whether for woe or weal. Like a joke or gossip, once you know what the secret is, not only do you hold the key to understanding but you can also pass the information on yourself, becoming the storyteller, the wise one.