History Literature / TheDaVinciCode

** "Madonna of the Rocks" hangs in the Grand Gallery, not the Salle des Etats. The painting directly across from the Art/MonaLisa" is Caliari's "The Wedding Feast at Cana." This painting is an enormous 32 feet (9.9 meters) wide. Even if "Virgin of the Rocks" did hang opposite the "Mona Lisa," it's 6.5 feet (1.99 meters) tall, too tall for Sophie to see over. The painting's ornate wooden frame is also too heavy for an average person to lift unassisted.

** "Madonna of the Rocks" hangs in the Grand Gallery, not the Salle des Etats. The painting directly across from the "Mona Lisa" is Caliari's "The Wedding Feast at Cana." This painting is an enormous 32 feet (9.9 meters) wide. Even if "Virgin of the Rocks" did hang opposite the "Mona Lisa," it's 6.5 feet (1.99 meters) tall, too tall for Sophie to see over. The painting's ornate wooden frame is also too heavy for an average person to lift unassisted.

** He says the French police judiciaire is the equivalent of the FBI. It's not-this refers simply to detectives. The closest France has to the FBI is the National Police, but there is no exact equivalent because of the way France's government is organized. It is not federated like the US, so there's no need for an interstate agency. The National Police takes care of civil law enforcement duties for the entire country -- except in smaller towns and more remote areas, where the Gendarmerie has jurisdiction, and municipal police exist in some towns and cities -- and the police judiciaire is the section of the National Police that investigates the most serious crimes such as murders. Whether this is a case of CreatorProvincialism or just another case of Dan not doing the research (or both) isn't clear.

** He says the French police judiciaire is the equivalent of the FBI. It's not-this refers simply to detectives. The closest France has to the FBI is the National Police, but there is no exact equivalent because of the way France's government is organized. It is not federated like the US, so there's no need for an interstate agency. The National Police takes care of civil law enforcement duties for the entire country -- except in smaller towns and more remote areas, where the Gendarmerie has jurisdiction, and municipal police exist in some towns and cities -- and the police judiciaire is the section of the National Police that investigates the most serious crimes such as murders. Whether this is a case of CreatorProvincialism or just another case of Dan not doing the research (or both) isn't clear.

** Langdon claims that the word ''cross' ' derives from Latin ''cruciare'' "to torture". Actually, it's the other way round - ''cruciare'' derives from Latin ''crux'', which translates to - cross.

* DanBrowned: Helped inspire the trope.

** While the Medieval Witch trials existed and were pretty horrible, the book claims that five million women were executed in them - which is wrong by a magnitude. Modern, scholastic estimations range from 40,000 to 60,000 victims in Europe in total.

* Invoked. When Sophie discovers a GPS tracker, she attaches it to a bar of soap, and throws it on to a passing truck, which is later stopped by the police.

* ChristianityIsCatholic: Very much at play in the movie, in which no mention is made of the fact that the Temple Church and Westminster Abbey are both Church of England (Anglican) churches. The same goes for Rosslyn Chapel, which is Episcopal Church of Scotland (also Anglican).

** There's the whole ''the goddess'' thing, which implies that all pagan religions worshipped female deities in a similar way and that it made them more egalitarian as a society. Here Brown seems to be under the impression that "paganism" was a sort of unified, global religion with different localizations instead of an umbrella term used by early Christians to label just all non-Christian beliefs they found.[[note]]Had they been that unified, they'd have been better able to resist the Christian takeover. Maybe.[[/note]] The idea that pagan religions had a stronger female presence than patristic Christianity is true in several ways, but the social role of goddesses and women varied ''wildly'' through time and place, and even the most liberated pagan societies like the Celtic or the Germanic ones were far from being a straight FeministFantasy. The fact that Brown chose Classical goddesses to make this point is even more ludicrous, as Greek and Roman societies were strongly male-dominated despite their impressive abundance of female deities.

* SurprisinglyRealisticOutcome: It turns out that leading a manhunt against two innocent people across international lines, and directly blocking their means of seeking legal protection or an embassy's refuge, is bad PR. Robert himself notes that he has no motive, murder weapon, or the time since his alibi was he was in his hotel room after Jacques stood him up for drinks. That's because Jacques was busy being murdered. Fache is forced to admit that he was wrong when [[spoiler:learning from Aringosa that neither Sophie nor Robert was involved in the murders, and his priority becomes to ''save'' Robert and Sophie from the real killer]]. Even so, though Robert and Sophie show no hard feelings, the press certainly does. At the end, they're watching the news as a journalist asks Officer Collet if [[spoiler:Robert and Sophie are going to pursue a lawsuit against the French police, rightly pointing out this was a gross MiscarriageofJustice by smearing two innocent people and making them France's most wanted]].

** The small stone pyramid under the inverted glass pyramid in the Louvre underground mall is just a modern architectural installation, and it is not [[spoiler:the tip of a larger, buried pyramid containing the tomb of Mary Magdalene.]] There are photos of the stone pyramid temporary removed for maintenance, and even in its regular position it's pretty obvious it's not connected to anything below the floor level.

* NonNaziSwastika: In the film, Langdon is making a conference. He shows part of an image of a swastika, everyone thinks about Nazis, then Langdon shows the complete image, with a clearly Buddhist context.

** The message written by Saunière next to his body in the Louvre includes the anagrams of ''Leonardo da Vinci'' and ''the Mona Lisa''. The message on the Plexiglas protecting the ''Mona Lisa'' is an anagram of ''the Madonna of the Rocks''.

* LinkedListClueMethodology: The cryptex; a moderately clever way to protect a secret message -- basically a combination lock with a vial of vinegar to destroy the encased papyrus should one attempt to open it without the password(s).

* KnightTemplar: The original Knights Templar figure heavily in the AncientConspiracy AlternateHistory of the book. Ironically, practically all the antagonists of the book also follow this trope, being extremely moral [[AntiVillain Anti-Villains]], [[WellIntentionedExtremist Well-Intentioned Extremists]], or just badly misinformed. This is most evident in [[spoiler:the Teacher, Sir Leigh Teabing, a Knight of the British Empire who also sees himself as furthering the good works of the original Knights Templar]].

* TheScourgeOfGod: Silas insists that he's doing God's will.

In 2006, a [[TheFilmOfTheBook film adaptation]] was released, directed by Creator/RonAward and with an AllStarCast including Creator/TomHanks, Creator/AudreyTautou, Creator/IanMcKellen, Creator/PaulBettany, Creator/AlfredMolina, Creator/JeanReno, Creator/JurgenProchnow and Jean-Pierre Marielle.

''The Da Vinci Code'' is a 2003 thriller written by Creator/DanBrown. It sold 80 million copies worldwide, becoming one of the bestselling novels in history. It also caused a huge controversy because of its statements about early Christianity, and was sharply criticized for that and its historical inaccuracy. In 2006, a [[TheFilmOfTheBook film adaptation]] was released.

** The grail being of the Merovingian bloodline is portrayed as being kind of a big deal. While they were kings, aside from Clovis, most of them were little better than barbarian warlords and tended to be more incompetent than the last as time went on. Although, it should be noted that part of this negative image of incompetent kings is due to the propaganda of their successors, the Carolingians, who evicted the last Merovingian king and therefore had an interest in portraying them as lazy incompetents to justify their own power-grab. Historians are still debating the issue, but as with the other so-called "barbarian" people who founded kingdoms on the ruins of the Roman Empire, they are questioning how "barbarous" these people really were. [[Administrivia/RuleOfCautiousEditingJudgment And we'll leave it that way.]]

* AdaptationalVillainy: Bishop Aringarosa gets this in TheMovie. In the book, he's just the leader of Opus Dei (where he's presented as nothing more than an unusually conservative Catholic prelate) who gets roped into helping The Teacher find the tomb out of desperation to keep his order from being abolished, and in fact, actually requests that the "bearer bonds" worth 20 million euros he was ordered to bring to Teabing instead be distributed amongst the families of the murder victims. In TheMovie, he leads a secretive "shadow council" within the Church that actively wants to destroy the tomb to prevent evidence of Jesus' bloodline from reaching the public, and he manipulates police captain Fache (who's an Opus Dei member in the movie) into hunting down Langdon despite his innocence.

** In TheMovie, the Catholic Church's "shadow council" wants to destroy Mary Magdalene's tomb to prevent evidence of Jesus's bloodline from reaching the public. They seem to think that having access to DNA samples from Mary Magdalene's corpse would, by itself, give someone a way to prove that she and Jesus had children. Actually, it would just prove that ''she'' had children at some point (not exactly an Earth-shattering revelation). Proving that Jesus fathered her children would require a DNA sample from Jesus, too.

* SinisterMinister: Bishop Aringarosa in TheMovie, due to AdaptationalVillainy, along with his co-conspirators within the Catholic Church.

* StrawmanFallacy: In the film discovering descendants of Jesus is treated as something that would destroy the Catholic church, and [[spoiler: Teabing and the Piory]] wants to bring down the Church for centuries of persecution and deceit. This is a straw argument for several reasons. Christ's divinity and spiritual authority did not come from human genes, so there's no reason to think his spiritual power can be passed on by them. In addition, God being infinite, it would not be diluted across His descendants; not to mention being Christian cannot be inherited from one's parents, it requires a personal decision. Proving that Jesus had a wife and descendants would be a remarkable finding that would cause a stir, but marriage is a God-ordained union, a sacrament in the Catholic Church and a central feature of Christianity so it would not do what the film claims it would do. [[Administrivia/RuleOfCautiousEditingJudgment And we'll leave it at that.]]

** The movie ends with the revelation that Sophie Neveu is Jesus' only living direct descendant. As Langdon rather melodramatically phrases it: ''"Sophie...you are the secret!"'' In other words: a 2,000-year-old bloodline (descended from a couple who had ''multiple'' children) has exactly '''one''' living direct descendant. In the book, the final revelation is a lot less dramatic: Sophie and her long-lost brother (who's [[DeathByAdaptation dead]] in the movie) are just two of several descendants of one of several French families who claim to trace their lineage back to Jesus and Mary Magdalene, and it's implied that Jesus and Mary Magdalene have so many descendants that being related to them isn't good for much other than bragging rights.