Gérard de Sède

In a 2005 TV documentary, de Sede's son Arnaud stated categorically that his father and Plantard had made up the existence of the Priory of Sion — to quote Arnaud de Sède in the programme, "it is absolute piffle".

Gérard de Sède died in Désertines (Montluçon), on Saturday, 29 May 2004, de Sède's coffin was draped with the flag of the Soviet Union. He was buried in Lieoux.

He afterwards moved to Nicaragua, then to Belgium, before returning to France during the 1990s.

Gérard de Sède returned to the subject matter of Bérenger Saunière during the late 1980s writing Rennes-le-Château: le dossier, les impostures, les phantasmes, les hypothèses, discounting the Plantard-related material that had appeared over the previous 20 years. He claimed Saunière obtained his wealth from the Habsburgs in return for parchments containing "politico-genealogical secrets" about the descent of Louis XVII. He claimed the "Merovingian romance" was a parody where Dagobert II replaced Louis XVI, his son Sigebert IV replaced Louis XVII and Pierre Plantard replaced Charles-Guillaume Naundorff.

De Sède and Plantard fell out over book royalties relating to L'Or de Rennes and never worked together again, at the same time Philippe de Chérisey announced the "parchments" were his creations that he later elaborated upon in his 1978 unpublished document entitled L'Énigme de Rennes, claiming they were originally made for his friend Francis Blanche, as material for a French radio serial entitled Signé Furax. The story about the parchments was previously given in the 1977 document by Jean Delaude entitled Le Cercle d'Ulysse.

L'Or de Rennes was to have a lasting impact on British script-writer Henry Lincoln, who read the book while on holiday in the Cévennes in 1969, leading him to inspire three BBC Two Chronicle documentaries, as well as working some of its material into the 1982 bestseller Holy Blood, Holy Grail which itself was used as source material for the bestselling 2003 novel by Dan Brown, The Da Vinci Code.

De Sède authored more than 20 books and contributed articles to various magazines, sometimes using the pseudonyms Pumaz, Allard, Gillot and Simon. He is best known for his 1967 book L'Or de Rennes, ou La Vie insolite de Bérenger Saunière, curé de Rennes-le-Château ("The Gold of Rennes, or The Strange Life of Bérenger Saunière, Priest of Rennes-le-Château"), published as a paperback in 1968 entitled Le Trésor Maudit de Rennes-le-Château ("The Accursed Treasure of Rennes-le-Château"). A revised and updated version entitled Signé: Rose+Croix was published in 1977.

De Sède and Plantard collaborated next on the subject of Rennes-le-Château, resulting in the publication of L'Or de Rennes in 1967.

At the beginning of the 1950s de Sède associated with the poets Nazim Hikmet and Edouard Glissant, and with the philosopher Henri Lefebvre. At the same time he re-established contact with André Breton.

De Sède married Marie-Andrée in February 1947, commonly known as 'Sophie', who had been his companion in the resistance. He decided to study philosophy and became a pupil of Gaston Bachelard, under whom he wrote a dissertation on Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

The group published a series of pamphlets. Its third issue, in 1943, included Gérard de Sède's L'Incendie habitable ("The Inhabitable Fire").

In 1941, he was a member of the Surrealist group "La Main à Plume", which was named after a phrase by Arthur Rimbaud, "La main à plume vaut la main à charrue" ("The hand that writes is equal to the hand that ploughs").

It was during his period as a farmer that he employed and got to know Roger Lhomoy - Lhomoy had previously worked since 1929 as a tourist guide at the Château de Gisors in Normandy and claimed to have discovered under the tower donjon in March 1946, a secret entrance to a long basement thirty meters long, nine meters wide, and approximately four and a half meters high, saying it was a subterranean chapel dedicated to Saint Catherine. He alleged it contained nineteen sarcophagi of stone, each two meters long and sixty centimeters wide, with 30 iron coffers arranged in columns of ten. Lhomoy said it was the treasure of the Knights Templar These allegations inspired Gérard de Sède to write a magazine article about Gisors, that caught the attention of Pierre Plantard, who wrote to de Sède. They collaborated on Les Templiers sont parmi nous, ou, L'Enigme de Gisors ("The Templars are Amongst Us, or The Enigma of Gisors"), that was published in 1962, containing passing references to the Priory of Sion. Lhomoy was finally dismissed as a liar when in 1964 an official excavation produced a negative result. Philippe de Chérisey, a friend and associate of Pierre Plantard, later claimed in 1978 that the subterranean chapel contained "30 iron coffers of the archives of the Priory of Sion."

Géraud-Marie de Sède, baron de Liéoux (5 June 1921 – 29 May 2004) was a French author, writing under the nom-de-plume of Gérard de Sède, and a member of various surrealist organizations. He was born into an aristocratic family from Comminges, the son of Marcel Alfred Gustave de Sède, baron de Liéoux and Aimée de Sède de Liéoux 's first cousins, once removed. De Sède's father was the senior editor of the Catholic newspaper Le Courrier du Pas-de-Calais owned by the De Sède family.