THE BID FOR THE THRONE OF FRANCE
By the mid-1620s the throne of France was occupied by Louis XIII. But the power behind the throne, and the real architect of French policy, was the king’s prime minister, Cardinal Richelieu. Richelieu is generally acknowledged to have been the arch-Machiavel, the supreme machinator, of his age. He may have been something more as well.
While Richelieu established an unprecedented stability in France, the rest of Europe—and especially Germany—flamed in the throes of the Thirty Years War. In its origins the Thirty Years War was not essentially religious. Nevertheless, it quickly became polarized in religious terms. On one side were the staunchly Catholic forces of Spain and Austria. On the other were the Protestant armies of Sweden and the smaller German principalities—including the Palatinate of the Rhine, whose rulers, Elector Frederick and his wife Elizabeth Stuart, were in exile at the Hague. Frederick and his allies in the field were endorsed and supported by Rosicrucian thinkers and writers both on the continent and in England.
In 1633 Cardinal Richelieu embarked on an audacious and seemingly incredible policy. He brought France into the Thirty Years War—but not on the side one would expect. For Richelieu a number of considerations took precedence over his religious obligations as cardinal. He sought to establish French supremacy in Europe. He sought to neutralize the perpetual and traditional threat posed to French security by Austria and Spain. And he sought to shatter the Spanish hegemony that had obtained for more than a century— especially in the old Merovingian heartland of the Low Countries and parts of modern Lorraine. As a result of these factors Europe was taken aback by the unprecedented action of a Catholic cardinal, presiding over a Catholic country, dispatching Catholic troops to fight on the Protestant side—against other Catholics. No historian has ever suggested that Richelieu was a Rosicrucian. But he could not possibly have done anything more in keeping with Rosicrucian attitudes, or more likely to win him Rosicrucian favor.
In the meantime the house of Lorraine had again begun to aspire, albeit obliquely, to the French throne. This time the claimant was Gaston d’Orléans, younger brother of Louis XIII. Gaston was not himself of the house of Lorraine. In 1632, however, he had married the duke of Lorraine’s sister. His heir would thus carry Lorraine blood on the maternal side; and if Gaston ascended the throne Lorraine would preside over France within another generation. This prospect was sufficient to mobilize support. Among those asserting Gaston’s right of succession we found an individual we had encountered before—Charles, duke of Guise. Charles had been tutored by the young Robert Fludd. And he had married Henriette-Catherine de Joyeuse, owner of Couiza and Arques—where the tomb identical to the one in Poussin’s painting is located.
Attempts to depose Louis in favor of Gaston failed, but time, it seemed, was on Gaston’s side, or at least on the side of Gaston’s heirs, for Louis XIII and his wife, Anne of Austria, remained childless. Rumors were already in circulation that the king was homosexual or sexually incapacitated; and indeed, according to certain reports following his subsequent autopsy, he was pronounced incapable of begetting children. But then, in 1638, after twenty-three years of sterile marriage, Anne of Austria suddenly produced a child. Few people at the time believed in the boy’s legitimacy, and there is still considerable doubt about it. According to both contemporary and later writers, the child’s true father was Cardinal Richelieu, or perhaps a "stud" employed by Richelieu, quite possibly his protégé and successor, Cardinal Mazarin. It has even been claimed that after Louis XIII’s death, Mazarin and Anne of Austria were secretly married.
In any case the birth of an heir to Louis XIII was a serious blow to the hopes of Gaston d’Orléans and the house of Lorraine. And when Louis and Richelieu both died in 1642, the first in a series of concerted attempts was launched to oust Mazarin and keep the young Louis XIV from the throne. These attempts, which began as popular uprisings, culminated in a civil war that flared intermittently for ten years. To historians that war is known as the Fronde. In addition to Gaston d’Orléans, its chief instigators included a number of names, families, and titles already familiar to us. There was Frédéric-Maurice de la Tour d’Auvergne, duke of Bouillon. There was the viscount of Turenne. There was the duke of Longueville—grandson of Louis de Gonzaga, duke of Nevers and alleged grand master of Sion half a century before. The headquarters and capital of the frondeurs was, significantly enough, the ancient Ardennes town of Stenay.
THE COMPAGNIE DU SAINT-SACREMENT
According to the "Prieuré documents" the Prieuré de Sion, during the mid-seventeenth century, "dedicated itself to deposing Mazarin." Quite clearly it would seem to have been unsuccessful. The Fronde failed, Louis XIV did mount the throne of France, and Mazarin, though briefly removed, was quickly reinstated, presiding as prime minister until his death in 1660. But if Sion did in fact devote itself to opposing Mazarin, we at last had some vector on it, some means of locating and identifying it. Given the families involved in the Fronde—families whose genealogies also figured in the "Prieuré documents"—it seemed reasonable to associate Sion with the instigators of that turmoil.
The "Prieuré documents" had asserted that Sion actively opposed Mazarin. They also asserted that certain families and titles—Lorraine, for example, Gonzaga, Nevers, Guise, Longueville, and Bouillon— had not only been intimately connected with the order, but also provided it with some of its grand masters. And history confirmed that it was these names and titles that had loomed in the forefront of resistance to the cardinal. It thus seemed that we had located the Prieuré de Sion and that we had identified at least some of its members. If we were right, Sion—during the period in question, at any rate—was simply another name for a movement and a conspiracy historians had long recognized and acknowledged.
But if the frondeurs constituted an enclave of opposition to Mazarin, they were not the only such enclave. There were others as well, overlapping enclaves that functioned not only during the Fronde but long afterward. The "Prieuré documents" themselves refer repeatedly and insistently to the Compagnie du Saint-Sacrement. They imply, quite clearly, that the compagnie was in fact Sion, or a façade for Sion, operating under another name. And certainly the compagnie—in its structure, organization, activities, and modes of operation—conformed to the picture we had begun to form of Sion.
The Compagnie du Saint-Sacrement was a highly organized and efficient secret society. There is no question of its being fictitious; on the contrary, its existence has been acknowledged by its contemporaries as well as by subsequent historians. It has been exhaustively documented, and numerous books and articles have been devoted to it. Its name is familiar enough in France, and it continues to enjoy a certain fashionable mystique. Some of its own papers have even come to light.
The compagnie is said to have been founded, between 1627 and 1629, by a nobleman associated with Gaston d’Orléans. The individuals who guided and shaped its policies remained scrupulously anonymous, however, and are still so today. The only names definitively associated with it are those of intermediate or lower-ranking members of its hierarchy—the "front men," so to speak, who acted on instructions from above. One of these was the brother of the duchess of Longueville. Another was Charles Fouquet, brother of Louis XIV’s superintendent of finances. And there was the uncle of the philosopher Fénelon who, half a century later, exerted a profound influence on Freemasonry through the Chevalier Ramsay. Among those most prominently associated with the compagnie were the mysterious figure now known as Saint Vincent de Paul; Nicolas Pavillon, bishop of Alet, the town a few miles from Rennes-le-Château; Jean Jacques Olier, founder of the seminary of Saint Sulpice. Indeed Saint Sulpice is now generally acknowledged to have been the compagnie’s center of operations."9
In its organization and activities the compagnie echoed the Order of the Temple and prefigured later Freemasonry. Working from Saint Sulpice, it established an intricate network of provincial branches or chapters. Provincial members remained ignorant of
their directors’ identities. They were often manipulated on behalf of objectives they themselves did not share. They were even forbidden to contact each other except via Paris, thus ensuring a highly centralized control. And even in Paris the architects of the society remained unknown to those who obediently served them. In short, the compagnie comprised a hydra-headed organization with an invisible heart. To this day it is not known who constituted the heart. Nor what constituted the heart. But it is known that the heart beat in accordance with some veiled and weighty secret. Contemporary accounts refer explicitly to "the Secret which is the core of the Compagnie." According to one of the society’s statutes, discovered long afterward, "The primary channel which shapes the spirit of the Compagnie, and which is essential to it, is the Secret."10
So far as uninitiated novice members were concerned, the compagnie was ostensibly devoted to charitable work, especially in regions devastated by the Wars of Religion and subsequently by the Fronde— in Picardy, for instance, Champagne, and Lorraine. It is now generally accepted, however, that this "charitable work’’ was merely a convenient and ingenious façade, which had little to do with the compagnie’s real raison d’être. The real raison d’être was twofold— to engage in what was called pious espionage, gathering "intelligence information," and to infiltrate the most important offices in the land, including circles in direct proximity to the throne.
In both of these objectives the compagnie seems to have enjoyed a signal success. As a member of the royal "Council of Conscience," for example, Vincent de Paul became confessor to Louis XIII. He was also an intimate adviser to Louis XIV—until his opposition to Mazarin forced him to resign this position. And the queen mother, Anne of Austria, was, in many respects, a hapless pawn of the compagnie, which—for a time at any rate—managed to turn her against Mazarin. But the compagnie did not confine itself exclusively to the throne. By the mid-seventeenth century, it could wield power through the aristocracy, the parlement, the judiciary, and the police—so much so, in fact, that on a number of occasions these bodies openly dared to defy the king.
In our researches we found no historian, writing either at the time or more recently, who adequately explained the Compagnie du Saint-Sacrement. Most authorities depict it as a militant arch-Catholic organization, a bastion of rigidly entrenched and fanatic orthodoxy. The same authorities claim that it devoted itself to weeding out heretics. But why, in a devoutly Catholic country, should such an organization have had to function with such strict secrecy? And who constituted a "heretic" at that time? Protestants? Jansenists? In fact, there were numerous Protestants and Jansenists within the ranks of the compagnie.
If the compagnie was piously Catholic, it should, in theory, have endorsed Cardinal Mazarin—who, after all, embodied Catholic interests at the time. Yet the compagnie militantly opposed Mazarin— so much so that the cardinal, losing his temper, vowed he would employ all his resources to destroy it. What is more, the compagnie provoked vigorous hostility in other conventional quarters as well. The Jesuits, for instance, assiduously campaigned against it. Other Catholic authorities accused the compagnie of "heresy"—the very thing the compagnie itself purportedly opposed. In 1651 the bishop of Toulouse charged the compagnie with "impious practices" and hinted at something highly irregular in its induction ceremonies 11—a curious echo of the charges leveled against the Templars. He even threatened members of the society with excommunication. Most of them brazenly defied this threat—an extremely singular response from supposedly "pious" Catholics.
The compagnie had been formed when the Rosicrucian furor was still at its zenith. The "invisible confraternity" were believed to be everywhere, omnipresent—and this engendered not only panic and paranoia, but also the inevitable witch hunts. And yet no trace was ever found of a card-carrying Rosicrucian—nowhere, still less in Catholic France. So far as France was concerned, the Rosicrucians remained figments of an alarmist popular imagination. Or did they? If there were indeed Rosicrucian interests determined to establish a foothold in France, what better façade could there be than an organization dedicated to hunting out Rosicrucians? In short, the compagnie may have furthered its objectives and gained a following in France by posing as its own archenemy.
The compagnie successfully defied both Mazarin and Louis XIV. In 1660, less than a year before Mazarin’s death, the king officially pronounced against the compagnie and ordered its dissolution. For the next five years the compagnie cavalierly ignored the royal edict. At last, in 1665, it concluded that it could not continue to operate in its "present form." Accordingly all documents pertinent to the society were recalled and concealed in some secret Paris depository. This depository has never been located, although it is generally believed to have been Saint Sulpice.12 If it was, the compagnie’s archives would thus have been available, more than two centuries later, to men like the Abbé Émile Hoffet.
But though the compagnie ceased to exist in what was then its present form, nonetheless it continued to operate at least until the beginning of the next century, still constituting a thorn in Louis XIV’s side. According to unconfirmed traditions it survived well into the twentieth century.
Whether this last assertion is true or not, there is no question that the compagnie survived its supposed demise in 1665. In 1667 Moliere, a loyal adherent of Louis XIV, attacked the compagnie through certain veiled but pointed allusions in Le Tartuffe. Despite its apparent extinction, the compagnie retaliated by getting the play suppressed—and keeping it so for two years despite Molière’s royal patronage. And the compagnie seems to have employed its own literary spokesmen as well. It is rumored, for example, to have included La Rochefoucauld—who was certainly active in the Fronde. According to Gérard de Sède, La Fontaine was also a member of the compagnie, and his charming, ostensibly innocuous fables were in fact allegorical attacks on the throne. This is not inconceivable. Louis XIV disliked La Fontaine intensely and actively opposed his admission to the Académie Française. And La Fontaine’s sponsors and patrons included the duke of Guise, the duke of Bouillon, the viscount of Turenne, and the widow of Gaston d’Orléans.
In the Compagnie du Saint-Sacrement we thus found an actual secret society much of whose history was on record. It was ostensibly Catholic but was nevertheless linked with distinctly un-Catholic activities. It was intimately associated with certain important aristocratic families—families who had been active in the Fronde and whose genealogies figured in the "Prieuré documents." It was closely connected with Saint Sulpice. It worked primarily by infiltration and came to exercise enormous influence. And it was actively opposed to Cardinal Mazarin. In all these respects it conformed almost perfectly to the image of the Prieuré de Sion as presented in the "Prieuré documents." If Sion was indeed active during the seventeenth century, we could reasonably assume it to have been synonymous with the compagnie. Or perhaps with the power behind the compagnie.
CHTEAU BARBERIE
According to the "Prieuré documents" Sion’s opposition to Mazarin provoked bitter retribution from the cardinal. Among the chief victims of this retribution are said to have been the Plantard family— lineal descendants of Dagobert II and the Merovingian dynasty. In 1548, the "Prieuré documents" state, Jean des Plantard had married Marie de Saint-Clair—thus forging another link between his family and that of the Saint-Clair/Gisors. By that time, too, the Plantard family was supposedly established at a certain Chateau Barberie near Nevers, in the Nivernais region of France. This château supposedly constituted the Plantards’ official residence for the next century. Then, on July 11, 1659, according to the "Prieuré documents," Mazarin ordered the razing and total destruction of the château. In the ensuing conflagration the Plantard family is said to have lost all its possessions. 13
No established or conventional history book, no biography of Mazarin confirmed these assertions. Our researches yielded no mention whatever of a Plantard family in the Nivernais or, at first, of any Chateau Barberie. And yet Mazarin, for some unspecified reason,
did covet the Nivernais and the duchy of Nevers. Eventually he managed to purchase them—and the contract is signed July 11, 1659,14 the very day on which Chateau Barberie is said to have been destroyed.
This prompted us to investigate the matter further. Eventually we exhumed a few disparate fragments of evidence. They were not enough to explain things, but they did attest to the veracity of the "Prieuré documents." In a compilation, dated 1506, of estates and holdings in the Nivernais, a Barberie was indeed mentioned. A charter of 1575 mentioned a hamlet in the Nivernais called Les Plantards.15
Most convincing of all, it transpired that the existence of Chateau Barberie had in fact been definitively established. During 1874—75 members of the Society of Letters, Sciences and Arts of Nevers undertook an exploratory excavation on the site of certain ruins. It was a difficult enterprise, for the ruins were almost unrecognizable as such; the stones had been vitrified by fire and the site itself was thickly overgrown with trees. Eventually, however, remnants of a town wall and of a château were uncovered. This site is now acknowledged to have been Barberie. Before its destruction it apparently consisted of a small fortified town and a château. 16 And it is within a short distance of the old hamlet of Les Plantards.
We could now say that Chateau Barberie indisputably existed and was destroyed by fire. And given the hamlet of Les Plantards, there was no reason to doubt it had been owned by a family of that name. The curious fact was that there was no record of when the château had been destroyed or by whom. If Mazarin was responsible, he would seem to have taken extraordinary pains to eradicate all traces of his action. Indeed, there seemed to have been a methodical and systematic attempt to wipe Chateau Barberie from the map and from history. Why embark on such a process of obliteration unless there was something to hide?
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