It’s a remarkable twist of fate. The Knights Templar were annihilated by a French king – Philip IV – in the fourteenth century. Some 450 years later, a descendant of their nemesis – King Louis XVI – was imprisoned in the French Templar HQ – the Paris Temple. Sweet revenge? Maybe.
Between 13 August 1792 and 21 January 1793, Louis was detained in the Temple. Then he was led out through a mob to be guillotined. He had been indicted on charges of high treason. His wife, the queen, Marie-Antoinette, was also kept in the Temple – and would meet the same fate as her husband. Other members of the royal family imprisoned in the Temple were Elisabeth, the king’s younger sister, the dauphin Louis and princess Marie-Thérèse.
Templar revenge against the French king
Louis XVI and his family were imprisoned in the aftermath of the 1789 French revolution. When the king was guillotined, it was claimed that somebody in the crowd yelled: “Now Jacques de Molay, you are avenged!” De Molay was the last Templar grand master burned at the stake in the year 1314. So, this story suggests that as Louis lost his head in 1793, a latter-day Templar roared his approval on behalf of De Molay.
But in fact, this story is a complete fabrication. It was invented by a French Jesuit priest, Augustin Barruel, who developed a rather toxic conspiracy theory that Templars, Rosicrucians, Jews, and Freemasons had planned the French Revolution to overthrow western Christian civilisation. As we know from our own time, this kind of theory has endured.
Barruel was no friend of the Templars. In his book, Mémoires pour servir à l’Histoire du Jacobinisme, he argued that the Templars had survived to the present and had infiltrated Masonic lodges to promote their secret agenda. The line was taken up by a fellow contemporary conspiracy theorist John Robinson in his book, Proofs of a Conspiracy Against all the Religions and Governments of Europe.
The Templar fortress that imprisoned a king
The Templar fortress that imprisoned King Louis XVI in 1792/93 had been built in the 13th century. At its centre was an enormous keep: the Grosse Tour (great tower). This dominated the skyline of Paris in the Middle Ages. The impressive doors that once filled the entrance of the Grosse Tour are now kept at the Château de Vincennes – having survived the demolition of the Paris Temple in the 19th century.
Behind its thick walls, the knights had once stored vast amounts of bullion. One story has it that during a riot in Paris against currency devaluation, King Philip was forced to seek refuge at the Paris Temple. While there, his eyes feasted on all this Templar gold. And, the theory runs, this set him on a course of crushing the knights and stealing their wealth.
It’s perhaps fitting or even ironic that King Louis XVI also visited the Temple but this time as a prisoner. How the ghosts of those tortured and executed by order of his ancestor must have laughed at this pathetic spectacle.
Napoleon Bonaparte takes power
After a period of revolutionary chaos, a man called Napoleon Bonaparte declared himself Emperor of France in 1804. Napoleon demolished the Templar fortress in the first decade of the nineteenth century – it took quite a while apparently to take the thing down. He was worried that Bourbon royalists loyal to Louis XVI would converge there regarding it as a kind of pilgrimage site. That was the last thing he was prepared to tolerate and so in went the wreckers.
According to newspaper reports at the time, when the Grosse Tour came down, objects relating to both the first Templars, as well as Roman artefacts, were unearthed but, sadly, lost to history.
If you would like more information about the Templars, buy this book: The Knights Templar – History & Mystery – by Tony McMahon – published by Pen & Sword – available on Amazon, Waterstones, Barnes & Noble, and WHSmith.
