Patrice Chaplin: City of Secrets (Wheaton, IL: Quest Books, 2007, 336pp.)
A book review by Rene Wadlow

Patrice Chaplin is a writer of books and films, and her presentation of the hidden aspects of Gerona, an old Catalan city near Barcelona, has all the characteristics of a film script: short chapters, lively dialogue, and memorable scenes where the action takes place. Catalonia is divided between Spain and France, but there is a cultural unity to Catalan culture, and people have passed across the State frontiers when political events created the need: Spanish Republicans as the Civil War ended in 1939 moved into France; refugees from France and beyond crossed into Spain in the early 1940s as Nazi armies advanced; and anti-Franco activists moved back and forth to France in the 1950s.

Patrice Chaplin discovered Gerona when she was 15 years old and travelling with a girl friend to see the world with no particular aim in sight. They stayed on in Gerona, more attracted by young men than by old stones, but the stones have been there since Roman times, added to in the Middle Ages and again in the 19th century when Gerona was a center of fairly prosperous agricultural production. The small city in the mid-1950s was also a way station for anti-Franco activists to slip over into France. Franco was particularly worried about Catalan cultural identity. He had banned use of the language and publications in Catalan. Every form of cultural activity had to be carried out in secret, often aided by Catalan-speaking French.

Patrice Chaplin’s older boyfriend was involved in Catalan cultural activities and the defence of Catalan identity, so he was often active in closed meetings, running people across the frontier and in carrying money for the resistance work. The people involved in anti-Franco activities were part of networks and perhaps secret societies. Patrice Chaplin begins her story when she is 15 and her friend, José, in his mid 20s, and it ends when she is a grandmother of three and José is in his 70s. The story is not a continuous narrative but rather scenes from life at key moments, often involved with secrets and not fully understood networks

Gerona lends itself to keeping secrets not easily understood. It had been in Roman times a military outpost, and like all the soldiers in the Roman Empire, they practiced a wide variety of religions until near the end when Christianity was made the State religion. The soldiers thus became Christians without really ending their practice of other faiths. When the area started coming out of the 500 years of the “Dark Ages” following the fall of the Roman Empire, Spain had started its “golden age” with its mixture of Islamic, Jewish and Christian cultures. Gerona was the home of a leading Jewish scholar Nachmanides (.1194-1270 CE), a scholar of both the legalistic Talmud and the mystic-esoteric tradition of Cabala (also spelt Kabbalah). Nachmanides was in opposition to the more rationalist teaching of Maimonides who had lived in Cordoba and whose writings are still studied today. The opposition between the religious approaches of Nachmanides and Maimonides are a foreshadowing of tensions within the Catholic Church in the area from the 1880s until 1914 when the First World War made theological debates less immediate. The tension was also between a rationalist understanding associated with the Jesuits and a more devotional – sentimental Catholicism focused on devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus. The large white church on a hill which dominates Paris –Notre Dame du Sacré Coeur (Our Lady of the Sacred Heart )- was often called “We don’t like the Jesuits either”.

The Cabalist part of the story ends in 1492 when the Muslims and the Jews were expelled from Spain – mostly pushed to North Africa. The Muslims were more easily identified, and most were pushed out. However, more than half the Jews, like the Roman soldiers before them, said “Now, we are Christians” stayed in Spain and went on with their Jewish belief as before but had to be careful to keep ritual aspects hidden. Thus Cabalist teachings continued, passed on from master to student. Little by little, the Jewish origin was forgotten and some ideas entered into the belief system of Catholics. Thus there is a school of thought called the Christian Kabbalah – its main authors being in France in the 1500s, working on manuscripts taken out of Spain by the expelled Jews. The Cabala texts teach universal salvation for all humans and all species of creation – a doctrine attacked by both orthodox Jews and Christians. A mid-1500 Catholic theologian called the “Kabbalah a Trojan horse on the verge of assailing the true Church of Christ.” Thus it was best to study the Cabala in closed circles.

After 1492, Jewish homes in Gerona were taken over by Christians or were closed and largely forgotten. In 1970, with democracy restored to Spain and Catalan identity coming back in force, José decided to restore the Jewish quarter in memory of Nachmanides and the flowering of Catalan culture. José had hoped to develop a center for the teaching of Cabalist thought, but there are no serious teachers of the Cabala in the world and so the restored area was turned into a museum of Sephardic Jewish culture with artefacts sent from many parts of the world. (On the Cabala, it is worth reading Gershom Scholem’s On the Kabbalah and its Symbolism (New York: Schochen, 1965)

The idea of secret knowledge, secret societies and ritual ways to higher consciousness may have continued in the area with the ‘converted’ Jews. In any case, the idea of secret knowledge and secret societies was revived in the 1890s with stories of Rennes-le-Chateau in the nearby French part of Catalonia. Rennes-le-Chateau and its priest Bérenger Saunière in the 1890s has already given us the Da Vinci Code and The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail with stories of Jesus, Mary Magdalene and their children as kings of France and Vatican conspiracies to keep Jesus unmarried.

The facts, which Patrice Chaplin hints at but does not spell out because French and Spanish politics is not the theme of the book, are more straight forward. She mentions that Bérenger Saunière was in contact with the Marchioness of Chambord, widow of the last Pretender to the French throne who had an outside chance of overthrowing the Republic if he could gather enough army officers to back him, which he did not. There were, however, other royal lines that continued to claim a right to the throne. Patrice Chaplin also mentions members of the Hapsburg family who came to Rennes-le-Chateau.

There was a good deal of money circulating in the Royalist milieu in France which needed a safe haven close to Spain whose king could also have a certain claim to the French throne. Rennes-le-Chateau was such a safe haven – money laundering on islands not having yet been developed. It is likely that Bérenger Saunière, who was openly against a republican form of government, was part of a semi-secret royalist group, close to the frontier with Spain where they could go or place money if there was police action against them. L’Action Francaise, the powerful royalist newspaper began in 1900 and built on a host of small royalist circles, some more hidden than others. These royalist circles, nearly all of them Catholic, were made up usually of rural aristocratic families along with the servants who worked for them. They tended to keep out of public notice and did not show off their wealth. Bérenger Saunière did not have to find hidden treasures; he could easily have repaired the church and build a large house with what was given him to hold for the royalist cause.

His secret ways, his meeting with strangers, his trips across the frontier to Spain including to Gerona, his greater wealth than that usually associated with priests in a village of 300 people — all this could be linked to treasures, secret societies and secret knowledge in the public mind. In 1911 when the royalist cause became a nationalist political movement but with no hope of restoring a king and thus no need for keeping hidden money, Bérenger Saunière left the priesthood , having bought land just outside Rennes-le-Chateau and built a comfortable house but which did not need hidden treasures to finance. In 1917, with France at the most difficult period of the First World War, he died and was largely forgotten until a sort of Holy Grail revival began in the 1960s.

 The image of the Grail is also associated with the heart, and as the heart of Jesus became the focus of the devotional form of Catholic practice, the Grail and the heart combined again in the public mind. The more rationalist wing of the Catholic Church was very opposed to this sentimental current. Thus Bérenger Saunière was under pressure from church authorities in the south of France, not because he knew that Jesus had had children but because his devotional preaching and anti-government activities could reflect badly on the whole French church which had made a relative peace with the idea of a republic.

By 2005, when Patrice Chaplin’s story ends, the Catalan area had changed. The coast is devoted to tourism and the villages of the interior have become economic suburbs of the city of Barcelona. Spanish democracy has no need for secret political groups. The people in the old networks have died or gone on to other things. A few people passed on to her old letters which indicate some sort of connection to Bérenger Saunière’s royalist activities, but these were practical letters concerning meetings or money so there was no reason to expound a political thesis.

The book is fun reading and a look at a French and Spanish political scene nearly as far gone as the Cabalists.