Château d'Osthoffen

Osthoffen's original plan is the one children draw: a square with a tower at each corner. From the medieval castle survive the foundations, traces of the keep, recognizable by the rough-faced stonework under the west gable, opposite the entrance, and the north tower, probably the oldest part. The moats are impressive and have always been dry. Remains of the outer retaining walls still run along their southern side.

The guardroom is the most authentic piece of the Middle Ages at Osthoffen. It was never altered, and it is dark and hard to use. In Alsace, only one other guardroom of comparable size survives, at the Château de Morimont, in the south of the region. In an upstairs bedroom, a closet still marks where the old wall walk began.

Osthoffen sat badly, at the bottom of a small valley overlooked by a hill, and it could not stand up to artillery. In 1416 the bishop of Strasbourg took it after a siege of about ten days, then set it on fire. The castle lay abandoned for some eighty years. Meanwhile the fief passed from the burgraves of Osthoffen, lords of the place for six generations, to the Bock family, then, through the female line, to the Cleebourgs.

In the early 16th century, Jost von Seebach, an architect who had married into the family, took Osthoffen in hand and turned it into a lord's residence. He kept the overall plan, cut stone-mullioned windows into every facade, raised the two great Renaissance gables and built the stair tower, whose steps seem not to have moved since. The house stayed fortified. A huge defensive tower rose above it all, curtain walls closed off a courtyard that was still dark, and the only way in was a simple wooden footbridge.

Osthoffen's stair tower is listed as a historic monument by the French state, along with the facades, the moats, the terrace and the fountain. Jost von Seebach's coat of arms decorates a door lintel, reused during the 19th-century work.

In the 18th century, Osthoffen belonged to the Zuckmantels, who inherited it from the Seebachs through a daughter of the family, and then to their descendants, the Schauenburgs. Baron von Zuckmantel brought the house up to date. French windows replaced the mullioned ones, the curtain walls were torn down to let air into the courtyard, and a new roof, pitched more in the French style than the Alsatian one, was set lower than the gables, which have stood above it ever since.

During the French Revolution, the château was rented to Baron de Vietinghoff. Worried by the unrest, which targeted houses with pointed roofs, he acted first. He had the great defensive tower pulled down, twice as tall as today's, a job that took more than two years, and had the stair tower and the north tower lowered by a third and stripped of their roofs. A view from 1781 still shows the great tower standing. Another, from 1836, shows a modest house, with no dormers and no roofs on the towers.

"It's a château that, through all those eras, went up, came down, went up, came down. So it was destroyed, burned, rebuilt, burned again, rebuilt, fitted out, altered."
Marc Grouvel, owner's family, 2021

In the mid-19th century, Osthoffen got its silhouette back thanks to Jules, great-great-grandfather of the present family. He dreamed of being an architect but was made to join the army. He fought at Reichshoffen and was taken prisoner at Sedan, in the Franco-Prussian War. In the medieval taste of his day, he raised the lowered towers again, built a new tower where the great defensive tower had stood, and added dormers and pinnacles. He also created the front steps, the fixed bridge and the new door frame of the Renaissance tower, carved with the family arms. After 1860 a pleasure park replaced the crops that had once reached right down into the moats, with avenues of plane trees and lindens, ponds and drained marshland.

All this work mixed old and new stone, so Osthoffen has to be read with a critical eye. On the west facade, two buttresses far too massive for the wall remain a puzzle. A sandstone statue of Saint Quirinus, found at the bottom of the moats in the 19th century and placed at the top of a gable, was crumbling. Marc Grouvel's father brought the 350-kilogram (770-pound) statue down and entrusted it to the Ateliers du Louvre, which consolidated it and made a cast. An 80-kilogram (175-pound) copy now stands in its place on the facade.

"He took it to the Ateliers du Louvre in Paris, in an old van, on an old mattress. And the poor statue was falling to pieces on the way."
Marc Grouvel, owner's family, 2021

The tower room at Osthoffen, reached by a small staircase built into the thickness of the wall, has been left untouched. It reuses a fireplace from Touraine whose motto was erased by the Germans during World War II. A frieze of coats of arms runs around the room and reads like a family tree: six generations of burgraves of Osthoffen, then the Bocks, the Cleebourgs, the Seebachs, the Zuckmantels and the Schauenburgs, and finally, since Napoleon's Empire, the present family, whose dragon recalls the dragoon regiments.

François Grouvel, a general of the Empire and lieutenant general in the 17th Dragoons, settled in Alsace when he married the daughter of the mayor of Haguenau. His 1806 portrait hangs at Osthoffen. During the German occupation, the senior branch, a military one, had to leave Alsace, taking its weapons and decorations along, while the property went to the junior branch. These mementos nearly went under the hammer at Drouot, the Paris auction house. The family had the sale canceled and, in 2021, is giving them to the Napoleon Museum at Fontainebleau. The château's old archives and a large part of its library, on the other hand, were burned in the courtyard during World War II.

Osthoffen's fountain dates from the late 18th century and is said to have been a wedding present to a Zuckmantel born d'Haussonville. Fed by a spring in the village, it has flowed without a break for about 250 years, even in the worst heat waves. Its water runs into the moats, then the pond, then the lake. In the park, an oak about three hundred years old has had room to spread. In 2021 storks are nesting on a chimney again, for the first time since the outbuildings burned in 1961.

Osthoffen is one of about thirty châteaux still lived in across Alsace, out of some hundred in private hands in its two departments. After decades of lectures, plays and receptions held since the war, the family has scaled things back. In 2021 the château offers five guest rooms, set up on the former servants' floor, and from May to September it hosts about twenty weddings, under a tent and on the terrace. Couples and their families have the place to themselves for the whole weekend, from Friday through Sunday brunch.

"I was going to say a witness to its time. No, a witness to several times layered on top of each other in the same place. Fairly harmoniously, too."
Marc Grouvel, owner's family, 2021