CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

Les Dossiers Secrets

Langdon sat in stunned silence. Jacques Sauniere? Grand Master? Despite the astonishing repercussions if it were true, Langdon had the eerie sensation it made almost perfect sense. After all, previous Priory Grand Masters had also been distinguished public figures with artistic souls. Proof of that fact had been uncovered years ago in Paris’ Biblioteque Nationale in papers that became known as Les Dossiers Secrets.

Every Priory historian and Grail buff had read the Dossiers. Catalogued under Number 4o lm1 249, the Dossiers Secrets had been authenticated by many specialists and incontrovertibly confirmed what historians had suspected for a long time: Priory Grand Masters included Leonardo da Vinci, Botticelli, Sir Isaac Newton, Victor Hugo and, more recently, Jean Cocteau, the famous Parisian artist.
(Chapter 48, p. 206)

Yet again Brown bolsters his claims with references to definitive proof, authentication by experts and ‘what historians suspected for a long time’. Yet again, all these assertions are totally baseless.

Historians have not ‘authenticated’ anything about the so-called ‘Priory of Sion’, since all the evidence indicates quite clearly that the whole ‘Priory’ story was a hoax concocted by Pierre Plantard.

Brown’s assertion that ‘the Dossiers Secrets had been authenticated by many specialists and incontrovertibly confirmed’ is nonsense. On the contrary, the so-called Dossiers have been exposed as fakes by Philippe de Chérisey – one of those who assisted Pierre Plantard in faking them in the 1960s – as early as 1967. Pierre Plantard later tried to convince people that, while the original claims about the ‘Priory’ and the documents he and De Chérisey had planted in the Biblioteque Nationale were a fraud, there was a real ‘Priory’ with a totally different history and a new list of ‘Grand Masters’. This second list included the French politician Roger-Patrice Pelat and when Pelat was murdered, Plantard also admitted in the subsequent judicial investigation, under oath, that this new ‘Priory’ was also a complete hoax.

There was no ‘Priory of Sion’, the Dossiers Secrets were faked documents, the whole thing was an elaborate hoax perpetrated by royalist eccentrics and the fake Dossiers have not been ‘authenticated’ by anyone. The ‘historians’ referred to by Brown are non-existent and no-one outside of the strange world of occultists and conspiracy theorists take any of these things seriously at all.