Gérard de Sède

After passing his Baccalauréat, de Sède began studying law and literature where he met his future wife Marie-Andrée at the Sorbonne.

Attracted by the politics of Marshal Tito, de Sède moved to Yugoslavia with his wife and children before returning to France, holding several jobs in journalism before deciding to become a farmer.

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.

[7] 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.

The book was most famous for its reproduction of two "parchments" that were allegedly discovered by the priest: but for a variety of different reasons they have been identified as forgeries by Philippe de Chérisey.

The central claim in L'Or de Rennes was that Saunière found parchments proving that the lineage of the "last"[clarification needed] Merovingian king, Dagobert II, assassinated on 23 December 679, did not die with him as had previously been thought.

These genealogical documents implicated to an exceptional degree the Priory of Sion, a secret organisation working behind the scenes ever since the Carolingian and Capetian usurpations for the recognition of the legitimacy of the Merovingian line of descent to the throne of France.

[12] 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.