Menou Castle

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Entrance facade of the Menou Castle

The Menou Castle is a French palace in the style of Louis XIII , which in the town of Menou about 40 kilometers northeast of Nevers in Burgundy Nièvre stands. It was built in the second half of the 17th century by Armand-François de Menou as the successor to a burned down manor house. From the Menou family it came to the von Damas-Crux family through a daughter in 1764 and from there to the Dukes of Blacas after 1846.

The complex has been protected as a classified monument historique since February 15, 1996 . Your Park and the former access road avenue available since the May 31, 1994 separately under monument protection . The castle is privately owned and cannot be visited.

history

The area around Menou was previously called Nanvignes and was a separate seigneurie . Through inheritance divisions, it was owned by four parties at the beginning of the 16th century, one of which was the Tenon family. It gradually bought its shares in the Seigneurie from the other owners and finally reunited them in one hand in the 17th century. Guillaume IV Tenon died childless. His widow Marie Brisson married François de Menou, Seigneur von Charnizay , third in 1625 , and brought him the property. For the couple's son, Armand-François, Louis XIV elevated Nanvignes under the name Menou in recognition of services rendered in the military in June 1697 to marquisate . Armand-François had been using the castle since 1671 and had a new castle built between 1672 and 1684 according to the plans of the architect Barthélemy Le Blanc, because the old manor house had been destroyed by a fire in 1672. The cost of the new building was around 30,000  livres .

Site plan of the palace complex during the Napoleonic era, around 1825

After the death of the first Marquis in 1703, his widow Françoise-Marie de Clère inherited the castle before leaving it to her eldest son François-Charles de Menou in 1719. His second daughter Marie-Louise received the property in 1764 after the death of her older sister. In 1734 she married Louis-Alexandre de Damas, Count of Crux, and took the castle to his family. The couple used the facility regularly, but not as their main residence. This was the castle in Crux-la-Ville . In 1763, the widowed Marie-Louise withdrew to Menou and, despite her advanced age, prevented attacks on the castle during the French Revolution through her presence. As early as 1786 she had bequeathed it to her third-born son, Étienne Charles , who emigrated abroad during the revolution . Many of his properties were therefore confiscated and sold as national property. However, they were acquired by a granddaughter Marie-Louise, who later returned them to her uncle. He returned home to France in 1815 and received his title and peership from Louis XVIII. back. In the 19th century, Étienne Charles de Damas had radical changes made to the interior of the building, including the removal of a staircase in order to create a new salon and the furnishing of a new dining room. He also had the baroque French garden converted into an English landscape garden. In 1826 he received the Dauphin and his wife Marie Thérèse Charlotte de Bourbon with a big party on Menou.

With Étienne Charles' childless death in 1846, the Damas family died out in the male line. The castle fell to one of his great nieces, Henriette-Félicité du Bouchet de Sourches, who married Pierre-Louis de Blacas d'Aulps (first Duke of Aulps from 1821) in 1814 and who took the property to his family. The Duchess came to Menou regularly during the summer and the castle remained the property of the de Blacas until the 1980s. In the meantime, Henriette-Félicité's granddaughter Béatrix de Chastellux and her husband Alard de La Roche-Aymon used the castle as their residence. After Beatrix's death, the complex was no longer inhabited in the 20th century, and some of the valuable wall paneling was dismantled. During the occupation in World War II , German troops used the facility as a base. In 1987, the de Blacas family sold the building, which had since become quite shabby, to Jean-Luc Gaüzere and the designer Jacques Garcia. They began with a restoration and also had baroque gardens laid out based on models from the 17th century. In 2004 Garcia sold the complex in order to use the proceeds to finance part of the restoration and restoration of his other castle, Le Champ de Bataille .

description

The castle is located south of the center of Menou on Route départementale 117 (D117), which leads from Menou to Route nationale 151 (N151). At the north corner of the palace area there is a pavilion called the Palais de justice , which according to an inscription was built in 1681. Court hearings used to take place there, because the Lords of Menou had high and low jurisdiction .

Lattice gate at the entrance to the castle

Access to the complex is from the west through a wrought iron gate from the end of the 18th century, which shows the coats of arms of Marie-Louise de Menou and her husband Louis-Alexandre de Damas in the upper area. An avenue around 260 meters long, which was laid out by Armand-François de Menou in the 17th century, leads to the gate equipped with two rusticated pillars . Behind the gate it continues in a straight line to the middle of the main house ( Logis ) to the east and crosses two parterres with cut box trees , which are flanked by elongated farm buildings and a massive, round pigeon tower from 1675. The driveway ends at a stone bridge that crosses a water supply. This separates the farm yard from the forecourt of the main house and was silted up in the 18th century, but was restored during the restoration in the 1980s. The forecourt is closed by a low wall on the west side facing the moat. Its two western corners are occupied by square pavilions , the two storeys of which are covered by slate roofs. They are joined to the north and south by elongated, low buildings with hipped roofs .

There are no remains of the previous lodge building, first mentioned in writing in 1642. Today's main house is an elongated, rectangular building with two floors and pavilions at the south and north ends. Its seven-axis central part measures around 54.5 × 6.8 meters (28 × 3.5  toisen ). The square pavilions at the ends have high hip roofs and a side length of around 8.8 meters (4.5 toisen). On the east side, they are faced with smaller single-storey, square extensions with a tail hood . The palace chapel is located in one of them . The mansion has corner blocks and window frames in the same shape. The two floors of the building are clearly separated from one another by cornices from the outside. Under the eaves of the roof slate extends a tooth frieze . The top floor has ox eyes that lie in the window axes. The portal des Logis is crowned by a blown gable showing the coats of arms of the Menou and Clère families. It is located in the central axis of the building, which is emphasized by a central risalit . This has an additional attic storey at the level of the roof , which is crowned by a triangular gable on the entrance facade and closed off by a curved hood with an open lantern . On the garden side, the central risalit is equipped with a round arched gable instead of a triangular gable.

On the upper floor of the Logis, the King's Salon ( French Salon du Roi ) and the Cabinet of Metamorphoses ( French Cabinet des Métamorphoses ) are two more rooms with historical furnishings. In the southern pavilion, the furnishings of the sun room ( French Chambre de Soleil ) have been preserved. It got its name from a ceiling painting with allegorical representations, which among other things show a sun chariot . The wall paneling of this room has a rich sculptural decoration in the form of festoons . It is partly painted with gold paint, or its painting imitates marble . The room's large fireplace has a sculpted ledge and shows the Menou family coat of arms. On the chimney vent hangs a portrait of Françoise de Clère, the first Marquise of Menou, which is surrounded by rich decoration in the form of flower tendrils and crowned by a crown. The castle's oldest paneling hangs in the library of the house: it was made in 1616.

To the east and south of the Logis are baroque gardens that were reconstructed in the late 1980s. Inside there is an ice cellar in the shape of a pyramid and an aviary in the shape of a Chinese lantern.

literature

  • Raymond Colas: Menou. In: Françoise Vignier (ed.): Le Guide des châteaux de France. Nièvre. Hermé, Paris 1986, ISBN 2-86665-027-1 , pp. 57-58.
  • Claude Frégnac: Merveilles des châteaux de Bourgogne et de Franche-Comté. Hachette, Paris 1969, pp. 110-113.
  • Jean Vernier: Menou, son château, et Pierre de Blacas dʼAulps (1771–1839). In: Bulletin de la Société scientifique et artistique de Clamecy 2001. Société scientifique et artistique de Clamecy, Clamecy 2001, ISSN  0181-0596 .
  • Chateaux et manoirs du Nivernais. Volume 2. La Camosine, Nevers 2005, ISBN 2-9508115-3-1 .

Web links

Commons : Menou Castle  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d e Entry of the castle in the Base Mérimée of the French Ministry of Culture (French)
  2. ↑ Menou, le faste du Grand Siècle , accessed June 26, 2018.
  3. ↑ Jacques Jarriot: Une famille de bons ménagers. La branche nivernaise des Menou de Charnizay. In: Société dʼhistoire moderne et contemporaine (ed.): Revue dʼhistoire moderne et contemporaine. Volume 23. Presses universitaires de France, Paris 1976, ISSN  0048-8003 , p. 81 ( digitized version ).
  4. ↑ Jacques Jarriot: Une famille de bons ménagers. La branche nivernaise des Menou de Charnizay. In: Société dʼhistoire moderne et contemporaine (ed.): Revue dʼhistoire moderne et contemporaine. Volume 23. Presses universitaires de France, Paris 1976, ISSN  0048-8003 , p. 86 ( digitized version ).
  5. ^ A b c Raymond Colas: Menou. 1986, p. 57.
  6. ↑ Jacques Jarriot: Une famille de bons ménagers. La branche nivernaise des Menou de Charnizay. In: Société dʼhistoire moderne et contemporaine (ed.): Revue dʼhistoire moderne et contemporaine. Volume 23. Presses universitaires de France, Paris 1976, ISSN  0048-8003 , p. 96 ( digitized version ).
  7. ↑ a b Nanvignes, Menou (Villiers-Ménestreau). November 21, 2016 ( PDF ; 1 MB).
  8. ↑ Information about the castle on web-croqueur.fr , accessed on June 30, 2018.
  9. ↑ a b Jacques Jarriot: Une famille de bons ménagers. La branche nivernaise des Menou de Charnizay. In: Société dʼhistoire moderne et contemporaine (ed.): Revue dʼhistoire moderne et contemporaine. Volume 23. Presses universitaires de France, Paris 1976, ISSN  0048-8003 , p. 84 ( digitized version ).
  10. ^ A. Marlière: Clamecy et ses environs. Res Universis, Paris 1992, ISBN 2-87760-490-X , p. 235, column 2 ( excerpt as PDF ; 3.5 MB).
  11. ↑ Raymond Colas: Menou. 1986, p. 58.
  12. ↑ Jacques Jarriot: Une famille de bons ménagers. La branche nivernaise des Menou de Charnizay. In: Société dʼhistoire moderne et contemporaine (ed.): Revue dʼhistoire moderne et contemporaine. Volume 23. Presses universitaires de France, Paris 1976, ISSN  0048-8003 , p. 100 ( digitized version ).
  13. ↑ a b Annuaire des châteaux et des départements. 1899-1900. A. La Fare, Paris 1899, p. 479 ( digitized version ).
  14. ↑ a b Information about the castle on the website of the municipality of Menou , accessed on July 2, 2018.
  15. ^ Jean-René Van der Plaetsen: Jacques Garcia. Le soleil du Champ de Bataille. In: Le Figaro . Edition of November 15, 2013 ( online ).
  16. ↑ Information according to the Menou cadastral map available online at geoportail-gouv.fr
  17. ↑ a b c Information about the castle on the Cahiers du val de Bargis website (French) , accessed June 29, 2018.
  18. ↑ a b Jacques Jarriot: Une famille de bons ménagers. La branche nivernaise des Menou de Charnizay. In: Société dʼhistoire moderne et contemporaine (ed.): Revue dʼhistoire moderne et contemporaine. Volume 23. Presses universitaires de France, Paris 1976, ISSN  0048-8003 , p. 95 ( digitized version ).

Coordinates: 47 ° 21 ′ 57.1 ″  N , 3 ° 16 ′ 46.2 ″  E