Pierre Plantard: the Grand Monarch

 

“The future grand Monarch”

In Philippe de Chérisey’s “L’Affaire Jean-Luc Chaumeil” (translated by Vi Marriott and printed in the January 2006 Newsletter of the Rennes-le-Château Research Group), on pages 3 and 4 (pages 6 and 7 of the Newsletter) Chaumeil refers to Pierre Plantard as “the future Grand Monarch” and “the true Grand Monarch”. Of course, this brings up the question as to what exactly is meant by this Grand Monarch (or Great Monarch).
In The Sion Revelation, Lynn Picknett and Clive Prince dismiss The Dossiers Secrets and Merovingian bloodline as being a smokescreen for the real aims of the Priory of Sion. Picknett and Prince suggest that the Priory documents in the Bibliothèque Nationale were placed there not for the general public, but were specifically aimed at esoteric groups. I agree with this 100%. However, whereas they see Plantard’s aims as being political, I see them more as esoteric (with possible political implications).
Rather than being a massive red herring as Picknett and Prince suggest in The Sion Revelation, I think that the Merovingian bloodline was just one part of a laundry-list of things that he needed to do to fulfill the prophecies relating to the Grand Monarch (just as Jesus had to be of the bloodline of David to be the Messiah). I suspect that Plantard knew he would never actually be put on the throne of France, but the point was to be recognized by certain people, presumably certain esoteric types (as the average Frenchman would likely have never heard of the Grand Monarch), as the prophesied monarch (for whom it is not necessary to actually rule, and in fact mundane rule might have interfered with his actual aims!),(1) perhaps as a ploy to allow himself unlimited access to certain esoteric circles, which he could then command and perhaps actually achieve some real power, or find some esoteric secrets that actually meant something. Not a bad plan, actually.

Occult workings

In other words, he (like many occultists) wanted to find out what secrets the other occult groups were concealing, and that if they thought he even might be the real Grand Monarch, they would want to court him and reveal what they knew as inducements to get him to ally with them.
Why would anyone want to go to all this trouble? Because the esoteric scene is very incestuous. A lot of occult groups spend a lot of time worrying about what the other groups know and how to find out what they know. As a result, there is a lot of infiltrating, multiple memberships, and occultists starting their own groups to lure people in who might know something. The lure of secret knowledge has a very strong appeal. Therefore, few occultists belong to just one organization. They try to cover all the bases and join as many as they can, hoping that the new one is the one where they will learn all the really good secrets. It is a modern-day version of polytheism, where the ancients “hedged their bets” and joined all the mystery cults they could, and paid homage to every god, just in case. This inter-mixing allows for cross-pollination of ideas and accounts for some of the very strange bedfellows one sometimes finds.

Pierre Plantard realized that by setting himself up as Grand Monarch, he could bring them to him, and thereby bring together the scattered pieces of any great esoteric truths that might be held separately by different groups. In the BBC Timewatch “History of a Mystery”, Jean-Luc Chaumeil said that Pierre Plantard found connections like other people found shamrocks. Above all, Plantard was highly skilled in the ability to recognize patterns and pull together the disparate strands to make a coherent (or at least somewhat less confusing) whole. (2) He had reason to believe that the answers were out there, if one knew what to look for. He knew at least that he would recognize them if he saw them.

Merovingian blood

So what is the laundry-list of prophecies about the Grand Monarch as Pierre Plantard saw it (at least what we can determine from his known actions, there may of course be others that we have never heard of)?
The Merovingian bloodline has received the most attention, so I will deal with it first. The first question is “Why Merovingians specifically?” Part of the reason is that Plantard is also associating the Grand Monarch with le roi perdu (“the lost king”), so he must be from an ancient line, not another pretender for the Bourbon dynasty. It is true that the legends of the Grand Monarch never specifically mention the Merovingians by name. In fact, since several of the French prophecies refer to the Grand Monarch as a “Second Charlemagne”, one might expect the Grand Monarch to be of Carolingian blood (another defunct line, but with greater name recognition, at least before “Holy Blood, Holy Grail” made the Merovingians popular again). However, the quatrains of Nostradamus (3) do refer to “Trojan blood” several times.
“Trojan blood” is a reference to the legend that the first Frankish kings were descended from Francus, son of King Priam of Troy. Since the Merovingians were the first kings of the Franks, to the Priory this establishes their primacy.(4) The Merovingian king Dagobert I seems to have begun this as he would sign deeds with “ex nobilissimo et antiquo Trojanarum reliquiarum sanguine nati”.(5)

Nostradamus

Pierre Plantard used the pseudonym “Chyren” on the registration documents for the Priory in May 1956, and used the same pseudonym in articles for the magazine Circuit. This is a clear reference to Chyren Selin, Nostradamus’ name for the Grand Monarch. (Many commentators believe that Chyren was an anagram for Henryc, and thus a coded reference to Nostradamus’ own patron, Henry II.)
Another qualification explains why there was this little item in HBHG (p. 214 of my edition):

On January 22, 1981, a short article appeared in the French press... ‘A veritable secret society of 121 dignitaries, the Prieuré de Sion...convened its Convent at Blois on 17 January 1981... As a result of this Convent at Blois, Pierre Plantard de Saint-Clair was elected grand master of the Order...’

This is taken from Nostradamus, explicitly identifying the Great Monarch with the “King of the World”, made famous by René Guénon in his book of the same title:

IV-77
Selin monarch Italy peaceful,
Realms united by the Christian King of the World:
Dying he will want to lie in Blois soil,
After having chased the pirates from the sea.

More references

After abdicating on 10 July 1984, Pierre Plantard was again made Grand Master at a Convent at Avignon on 9 March 1989.(6) The reason is again to be found in the Centuries of Nostradamus:

VIII-38
The King of Blois will reign in Avignon,
once again the people covered in blood.
In the Rhône he will make swim
near the walls up to five, the last one near Nolle.

VIII-52
The king of Blois to reign in Avignon,
from Amboise and Seme the length of the Indre:
claws at Poitiers holy wings ruined
before Boni…

IX-41
The great “Chyren” will seize Avignon,
From Rome letters in honey full of bitterness:
Letter and embassy to leave from Chanignon,
Carpentras taken by a black duke with a red feather.

Pierre Plantard was said at this Convent to have evicted 5,000 Americans (more than half the Priory’s 9,841 members) from the Priory for what seems to be a metaphorical “bloodbath” (“the people covered in blood”). Afterwards, M. Plantard travelled from Narbonne to Perpignan and thence to Barcelona.
Each of these towns does have some relation to the mystery. Boudet wrote a booklet called Du Nom de Narbonne which prefigured his La Vraie Langue Celtique…, Salvador Dali (for another Surrealist connection) called the railroad station at Perpignan “la centre du monde” which has Nostradamian associations, and the archives of the Priory of Sion were found at Barcelona, which is also where the current Grand Master resides.

Even more references

I found this seemingly-offhand recounting of his itinerary rather suspicious, and was not surprised to find the answer again in Nostradamus:

VI-56
The dreaded army of the Narbonne enemy
Will frighten very greatly the Hesperians:
Perpignan empty through the blind one of Arbon,
Then Barcelona by sea will take up the quarrel.

While Nostradamus almost certainly meant Spain by “Hesperians” (meaning “those of the West”), some commentators on Nostradamus have identified Hesperia with America.

V-40
The royal blood (7) will be so very mixed,
Gauls will be constrained by Hesperia:
One will wait until his term has expired,
And until the memory of his voice has perished.

In an “Interview with Pierre Plantard de Saint-Clair” by Phie (8) in Le Cercle, p. 8, Plantard states that the Americans were having too much influence on the predominantly French (the Gauls) Priory. The above quatrain I think explains the need for Plantard to have to resign from the Priory (“his term has expired”) and then retake power before he could move against the “Hesperians”.

Plantard= Grand Monarch?

In conclusion, I would like to point out that Pierre Plantard himself never publicly declared himself to be the Grand Monarch. (Neither did Jesus publicly declare himself to be the Messiah. When people greeted him as “Son of David”, he would tell them to tell no one. When asked if he was the Messiah, he would equivocate and say, “Who do you think I am?” or “Thou hast said it,” meaning “You said it, not me.”) I believe that the reason for semi-secrecy (since Plantard apparently told confidantes like Jean-Luc Chaumeil, or at least helped them connect the dots) was because of the same principle as the lamed-vov.
The lamed-vov (Hebrew for thirty-six) are 36 unknown men who are the core of goodness in the world in Jewish legend. The thing is, if anyone announces that they are a lamed-vov, they are surely not one, as the lamed-vovs live quiet lives and do nothing for recognition. It is usually only after their deaths that it is decided that someone must have been a lamed-vov in life. Similarly, it shows psychological insight to recognize that your average person claiming to be the messiah or a lost king is usually dismissed immediately as delusional, but if one simply goes about fulfilling prophecies quietly, then people are able to “do the math” themselves and the moment of realization that someone has fulfilled all these prophetic qualifications is far more convincing than simply being told that someone is the Messiah or Grand Monarch or whatever.
However, given the above, where it looks as if Pierre Plantard has carefully laid the groundwork for proclamation of himself as Great Monarch since at least the 1950’s when he was using the pseudonym Chyren, he suddenly completely reversed himself in an article entitled, “The Merovingian Myth” in the April 1990 (and final) issue of Vaincre (when, in the preceding year of 1989, the actions that would have seemed to have cemented his candidacy for “Grand Monarch” occurred), Plantard wrote:

I have never claimed to be the descendant by the male line of DAGOBERT II, nor claiming to the throne of FRANCE, no more than descendant of JESUS. …on this error, one confabulated since 1956, until seeing in me, the “GREAT MONARCH”! I must say it, I was deeply touched to feel the distress of the French people, to carry all his hopes in the problematic arrival of a “MONARCH”, failing to be able to discover any current politician.... able to achieve this mission which would save our country from the invasion and the storm before the end of this century!

He positively seems to mock the very idea of what he definitely seems to have been encouraging for so long. It does not seem to make sense. I suspect that by this point, he had done whatever it was he had wanted to do. This would indicate that being believed to be the Grand Monarch was not an end in itself, but a means to an end, and that once that end was accomplished, it was necessary to distance himself from what had gone before. Besides the culminating of his seeming fulfillments of the Grand Monarch prophecies in 1989, that series of Vaincre also recounted new ties of the Priory of Sion to Spain and Barcelona. Pierre Plantard updated his article “Victor Hugo” to include favourable mentions of Spain, and the archives of the Priory were announced to have been found in Barcelona.(9) A new person was introduced, one Pablo Norberto, who wrote articles for Vaincre and became acclaimed Grand Master (after the very brief reign of Pierre Plantard’s son Thomas). Even now, the Priory is said to have as its Grand Master a wealthy lawyer from Barcelona named José-Maria Reguant. At this point, we don’t have enough pieces of the puzzle to create a complete picture, but perhaps this opens up a new avenue for research.

Bibliography

Gauthier, R.P., Le Grand Monarque et l’Antéchrist (le secret de Rennes-le-Château), Editions Godefroy de Bouillon, Paris, 2001.
Leoni, Edgar, Nostradamus and His Prophecies, Wings Books, Avenel, New Jersey, 1982.
Reeves, Marjorie, The Influence of Prophecy in the Later Middle Ages: A Study in Joachimism, University of Notre Dame Press, 1993.
Reeves, Marjorie, & Gould, Warwick, Joachim of Fiore and the Myth of the Eternal Evangel in the 19th and 20th Centuries, Oxford University Press, USA (May 1, 1987)
Reeves, Marjorie, Joachim of Fiore and the Prophetic Future: A Medieval Study in Historical Thinking, Sutton Publishing, 1999.

Notes

(1) See Peter O’Reilly’s translation of “Les Bergers d’Arcadie” from Le Charivari #18 (which was very recently reprinted by Jean-Luc Chaumeil as Rennes-le-Château: Les Archives du Prieuré de Sion with the legend “The photos of the treasure discovered by Abbé Saunière” in large type at the top of the front cover, though Henry Lincoln had revealed in 1997, in The Key to the Sacred Pattern (pp. 116-120, “Treasure for Sale”), that the “treasure” is actually that of Petroassa in Roumania) in the January 2006 Newsletter.

(2) In the first centuries of our era, the Gnostics disputed with the Christians. They were annihilated, but we can imagine their possible victory. Had Alexandria triumphed and not Rome, the bizarre and confusing stories that I have summarized would be coherent, majestic and ordinary. (Jorge Luis Borges, A Defense of Basilides the False, 1932)

(3) Pierre Plantard makes repeated reference to Nostradamus and seems to use the quatrains of Nostradamus as his primary source text on the Grand Monarch. He has an interesting means of interpreting Nostradamus which is well worthy of an article in itself. Some instances of this manner of interpretation appear in an article in the February 1986 issue of Etudes Merovingiennes, pseudonymously signed “Cheval Ailé” (winged horse, or Pegasus, the “horse of God”), Gérard de Sède’s La race fabuleuse, and I believe he is the mysterious Monsieur G. mentioned in Camille Bartoli’s Lire Nostradamus autrement (Reading Nostradamus Differently). As Baigent, Leigh and Lincoln wrote in HBHG: “Many of Nostradamus’ prophecies, in short, may not have been prophecies at all. They may have been cryptic messages, ciphers, schedules, timetables, instructions, blueprints for action.”

(4) The Priory seems very big on who was first. Alpha Galates means “the first Gauls”, and I believe that their insistence on the importance of the tribe of Benjamin may be because Saul, first king of the Jews, was of the tribe of Benjamin.

(5) Edgar Leoni, Nostradamus and His Prophecies, Wings Books, Avenel, New Jersey, 1982, p. 652.

(6) Thomas Plantard de Saint-Clair, Le Cercle, p. 6 and the April 1989 issue of Vaincre.

(7) Nostradamus wrote “sang royal” rather than “sang real” that I know that many of us would have preferred.

(8) In the version of the article that ran in the April 1989 Vaincre, the author is identified as Noël Pinot which was the name of a saint who was guillotined by revolutionary forces on 21 February 1794. Several other persons in Vaincre are referred to by the names of saints. I suspect that Phie/Pinot is someone whose birthday is 21 February.

(9) Nostradamus’ quatrain VIII-26 mentions what is usually translated as “The bones of Cato found at Barcelona” which might possibly be a reference to this, providing one can find a means of equating “The bones of Cato” {“De Caton es”} to “archives.”

Stephen Anderson
(originally printed in the Rennes-le-Château Observer issue number 49 and in the Winter 2007 Newsletter of the Rennes-le-Château Research Group – copyright Stephen Anderson)