Château de Gruyères

Gruyères was founded in the late 13th century by the counts of Gruyère, who made it their main residence and the seat of an ever larger territory. As vassals of the House of Savoy, they followed its model: the Savoyard square, a defensive enclosure with a tower at each corner. Perched on a steep hill, the castle was never attacked.

In the 15th century, Count Louis and his wife, Claude de Seyssel, set out to turn Gruyères into an elegant lordly residence, open and full of light. They converted an old defensive tower into a chapel. Dedicated to Saint John the Baptist, its apse still has stained glass made in 1482 by a workshop in Vevey: the Baptism of Christ on one side, a Pietà on the other, above a large medallion with the couple's coat of arms.

In the courtyard, the fortress gave way to a vaulted gallery in dressed stone, inspired by models from northern Italy or Lyon. Its two rows of tall windows were glazed, a rare and costly luxury that advertised the couple's wealth. The plan was to surround the whole courtyard with galleries, but it stopped partway. On the ground floor, the 13th-century kitchen, with its brick vault, got a large window and an oven cut into the defensive wall. Its modest size points to a smaller count's household than one might imagine.

The Burgundy Room at Gruyères recalls a battle every Swiss schoolchild knows. In the late 15th century, Charles the Bold, Duke of Burgundy, wanted to push his lands into what is now French-speaking Switzerland. Beaten once by the Swiss Confederates, who seized his treasure, he attacked again, this time the town of Morat, a few kilometers away. His troops were routed by small, mobile units armed with halberds, a weapon the Swiss invented in the 15th century, and driven back into the lake, which ran red with blood, people said at the time.

The spoils included the duke's banners and three copes, ceremonial cloaks from the mid-15th century, probably made for his father, Philip of Burgundy. Their black silk velvet is embroidered in gold and silver thread with the arms of the Burgundian duchies and with Philip's emblem. It is not a crown but a fire steel, the piece of metal used to strike a flint.

The late 15th century was the high point for the counts of Gruyère. They embellished Gruyères, sent their children to the French court and lived beyond their means. The cities of Bern and Fribourg gradually bought up their debts, until the count could no longer pay. Declared bankrupt in 1554, he had to leave his lands, which Fribourg and Bern divided between them.

Some fifty bailiffs from Fribourg then followed one another at Gruyères, collecting taxes, dispensing justice and running the region. They expanded the production of milk and of Gruyère cheese, made since the Middle Ages, and improved the way it was shipped. Packed in barrels, it went down to Vevey, crossed Lake Geneva by boat to Geneva, then followed the Rhône to the international markets of Lyon. In the 17th and 18th centuries, the international Gruyère trade was organized from the castle.

The Bailiffs' Room has a painted decoration rediscovered behind paneling in the late 1990s. Bailiff Jean-Jacques Joseph d'Alt commissioned it from a regional workshop: colonnades against a background of scrolling foliage, with a crane, the emblem of the region, between each pair of columns. The bailiffs also rebuilt in wood the galleries that run around the castle. A double sundial dated 1559, made useless once the galleries were roofed over, helps date them.

In 1848 the administrative seat of the Gruyère moved to Bulle, and Gruyères was put up for sale. The first bidders, building-materials dealers, wanted to resell the stone and timber. The state refused.

"The castle nearly ended up like Cluny, completely broken up."
Filipe Dos Santos, director, 2022

At the second auction, three brothers from Geneva bought it: Jean-François, known as John, Daniel and Antoine Bovy. They worked in precision watch mechanics and were drawn to the utopian ideas of Fourier. They were looking for a summer home at the foot of the Alpine foothills, far from the city, where they could host their friends, most of them artists, and live as a community.

Daniel Bovy, a painter trained in Paris in the studio of Ingres, had come back paralyzed from an accident at the Simplon Pass. His wheelchair is kept at the castle. His brothers put him in charge of the refurbishment. He set the framework for the decoration and invited his friends to paint: Barthélemy Menn of Geneva, who came with his students, the Alsatian Salzmann, then Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot. In the Corot Room, a landscape by the master answers one by Menn, hung between a glass of wine and a pipe. Corot came back a few years later to paint the medallions in the window recess. Four of his paintings have stayed in the spot he painted them for, which is extremely rare.

At Gruyères, the Bovys also wanted to bring back the golden age of the counts. They bought medieval furniture in the region, from dealers and old convents: parts of 15th-century beds, tables, credenzas and a chair that probably belonged to John II, the next-to-last count of Gruyère. The rooms of the count, the countess and the Belle Luce are gone, but their furniture remains.

The Knights' Hall is the only one of these historical decors still standing at Gruyères, and the most famous. Daniel Bovy painted the story of the counts there, from the founding of the town by Gruérius, a Vandal chief who took as his emblem a crane rising into a glowing red sky, to the battle of Morat. With no written history of the Gruyère to draw on, he turned to the writings of a pastor and to local legends.

"Very often, even today, for people from Gruyère, it really is history that's written on those walls."
Filipe Dos Santos, director, 2022

John II's chair was copied there by a cabinetmaker from Gruyères. Across from it, a replica bears the arms of the Bovy and Balland families. The fireback dated 1550 is a fake, part of a decor meant to pass for the counts' hall. In the Furet Room, two of Menn's students, François Furet and Jules Crosnier, painted flowers and butterflies together, along with three swifts perched on electric poles: the castle got electricity very early.

Of the three brothers who bought Gruyères, Antoine Bovy was the medalist. Trained in Paris, he engraved official medals, and the family struck coins in Geneva. When Switzerland, with a new constitution in 1848, created the Swiss franc in 1850, he engraved the first five-franc coin. A bronze cast of one design is on display at the castle. In 1874 he signed the model for the new two-franc coin.

"That coin is still in circulation today. We Swiss always have a few in our pockets. So we always have a little piece of the Château de Gruyères."
Filipe Dos Santos, director, 2022

The Balland family, related to the Bovys, took over Gruyères next. Around 1900 they laid out a geometric French formal parterre below the balcony. With no ornamental flowers to be had locally, they brought them in from Geneva. At the foot of the 15th-century ramparts they planted fruit trees, and the pear trees are still there.

In the late 19th century, Émile Balland wrote, or had written, the first guidebook to the castle: the house was already open to visitors while it still belonged to the family. As a member of the organizing committee of the 1896 Swiss National Exhibition in Geneva, he gave Gruyères pride of place in the Swiss Village, where the facade of the Chalamala house was rebuilt.

Auguste Baud-Bovy came to Gruyères to study with one of his teachers and met Zoé, an enamel painter older than he was, whom he married. One of their sons became a painter under the name André Valentin, the other, Daniel, an art historian in Geneva. Auguste later settled in the Bernese Alps, painted herdsmen and helped shape the Swiss national imagery of the turn of the 20th century. A gallery in the castle is devoted to him.

The Château de Gruyères has belonged to the canton of Fribourg since 1938 and has been open to visitors since 1939. A foundation has run and cared for it since 1993. In 2022 the tour leads from the chapel to the rooms painted by the Bovys' friends, then to the bailiffs' wooden galleries and the formal garden.