Dan Brown, Rennes-le-Chateau, Berenger Sauniere

So if the traffic at Rennes-le-Chateau is actually driven by HOLY BLOOD, HOLY GRAIL, can Dan Brown sue Teabing?

Sydney Morning Herald
Dan Brown has a lot to answer for. While the upper echelons of the bestseller lists may be enjoying a respite from The Da Vinci Code, a small village on a hill in southern France is having no such luck.

Nestled in the foothills of the Pyrenees in the Languedoc region of France, the tiny hamlet of Rennes-le-Chateau is being overwhelmed by camera-wielding tourists. There was a time when you could drive up the narrow road that winds carefully to the village without passing another car. Nowadays, the odds are you’ll be trailing a convoy of coaches crammed full of amateur historians.

All of which is a bit strange given that Rennes-le-Chateau is never actually mentioned in The Da Vinci Code. Where it is mentioned, though, is in The Holy Blood And The Holy Grail the book from which Dan Brown took many of his most controversial claims. First published in 1982, it never enjoyed the same stratospheric success as The Da Vinci Code, but it still made the bestseller lists and caused a maelstrom of controversy among church figures.

The speculative conclusions reached in The Holy Blood And The Holy Grail are now well known, thanks to Mr Brown. What if Jesus wasn’t killed on the cross? What if he actually went on to marry Mary Magdalene and have a child, descendents of whom could still be alive today? Perhaps then a secret organisation might have been set up to guard this sacred bloodline. And perhaps that organisation was originally the Knights Templar.

So how does Rennes-le-Chateau figure in all this? Well, it was the setting for an intriguing 19th-century mystery that sparked the interest of The Holy Blood And The Holy Grail’s authors and which eventually led them to their controversial conclusions.

Between 1885 and 1917, a handsome and charismatic man by the name of Berenger Sauniere was the parish priest at Rennes-le-Chateau. And in that time he spent the equivalent of several million dollars in today’s terms on restorations and improvements to the town and its church. Certainly enough to raise eyebrows in a quiet rural region of southern France.

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