Château de La Brède

The barony of La Brède goes back to the 13th century and the Lalande family, who very likely built the fortress. After it was damaged, the castle was rebuilt in the 14th and 15th centuries. Over time, owners wanted more comfort and light, and the defenses were gradually erased. Windows were cut into the walls, the three moats were merged into one large reflecting pool, and the drawbridges gave way to fixed bridges. A tall wall with a sentry walk disappeared to make way for a wide view over the countryside.

Around La Brède, the large dovecote, the woodshed tower and the guard tower recall its past as a refuge. On the east facade, the coats of arms of the families who inherited the château follow one another: Lalande, de l'Isle, Pesnel, Secondat. The barony passed to the Secondats when Marie-Françoise de Pesnel, a Lalande descendant, married Jacques de Secondat, a younger son who had refused to enter the Church and chose the army instead. His son, Charles-Louis de Secondat, inherited La Brède from him in 1713.

Charles-Louis de Secondat, the future Montesquieu, was born at La Brède in 1689 and studied at the Oratorian college of Juilly. In 1716, when his uncle Jean-Baptiste de Secondat died, he inherited his fortune, the barony of Montesquieu near Agen, which gave him his name, and the office of président à mortier, a presiding judge at the parlement of Bordeaux, the regional high court. Ten years later he gave it up. He said he understood nothing of it, and above all he wanted to write and travel. His Persian Letters had come out as early as 1721, unsigned and printed in Amsterdam, to escape the censors.

Sold in 1726, the office opened both paths for him. Elected to the Académie française in 1728, Montesquieu left right after his acceptance speech for Germany, Hungary, Austria, Italy, the Netherlands and England, and did not return until 1731.

In 1715 he had married Jeanne de Lartigue, a Protestant whose family owned property in Martillac, very close to La Brède, and who brought a dowry of 100,000 livres. Only a few months earlier, he had signed a marriage contract with the daughter of a Bordeaux city magistrate. During her husband's stays in Paris and his travels, Jeanne de Lartigue played the leading role in running the estate.

"He always came back to these lands at La Brède, where he loved to work, and where he also loved to grow the size of his fortune."
Isabelle Cazas-Audureau, director, 2021

Montesquieu changed very little inside La Brède, but he shaped its grounds. Along the moat he laid out a lawn parterre in geometric shapes, a formal garden extended by a long green carpet of grass to the edge of the forest. Next to it he planted a four-hectare (ten-acre) grove whose plan forms a double star, inspired by a treatise by Dezallier d'Argenville: hornbeam walks where he could stroll and think before going back to his desk. The meadows that stretch out in front of the château were his English-style garden.

On the bridges, the writer left his mark with lines borrowed from Horace and Virgil: "Countryside, when shall I see you again?" and "the master's delights."

The ground-floor bedroom at La Brède, probably the one Montesquieu used in the last ten years of his life, has been the most visited room in the house since his death. His original bedroom was likely upstairs, near the library. Recently restored, the room holds his ceremonial cane, his barometer, a reminder of his passion for science and his ties to the Bordeaux Academy, his gun, and a wooden trunk covered in studded leather that probably went with him from Juilly all the way to his European tour. A medallion reproduces the 1753 medal by Dassier.

After his death, the bedroom became a place of pilgrimage. Ordinary visitors and famous ones, Stendhal among them, came to pay their respects, and some left with a scrap of fabric from the bed. By the time it was restored, it was badly damaged.

"It's kind of a reliquary bed, because after Montesquieu died, this bedroom became a place of pilgrimage."
Isabelle Cazas-Audureau, director, 2021

A very plain table served as his desk, but Montesquieu dictated. Some twenty secretaries worked for him over about fifteen years, and the inventory drawn up after his death lists the next room as his secretary's. On the wall hang his brother Joseph, dean of the canons of Saint-Seurin in Bordeaux, and his youngest daughter, Denise, whom he called his little secretary and who helped him with his reading and his work on The Spirit of the Laws. A note found by the conservator suggests her portrait was painted from imagination, perhaps based on her father's.

At La Brède, Montesquieu worried as his son Jean-Baptiste grew older without an heir. To secure the line, he married Denise to a cousin, Godefroi de Secondat. It proved the right call. Jean-Baptiste's son, Charles-Louis, who sailed to America in 1780, fought at Yorktown alongside Rochambeau and was admitted to the Society of the Cincinnati, had no children. It was Denise who carried on the family.

That grandson took no part in the French Revolution and went into exile in England. The château was placed under state seizure for several years before a cousin restored it, at his request. He wanted the rooms to stay modest, so that both the family and visitors would find the writer's world as he had known it.

The great council hall, on the second floor, is the oldest part of La Brède: 150 square meters (1,600 square feet) under a barrel vault lined with wood paneling. Montesquieu made it his library. After his death, it held fourteen bookcases, three large and eleven small, under tapestries, and more than 3,000 books, along with the family archives. In the 19th century, new bookcases replaced the old ones.

Starting in 1994, Jacqueline de Chabannes donated Montesquieu's library and archives to ensure they would be protected and studied. Up to 2004, they joined the heritage collections of the Bordeaux library. Once emptied, the bookcases, which had no backs, let flakes of plaster fall, and traces of color appeared. Test openings carried out from 2014 revealed a cycle of paintings of horsemen, with a jousting scene, very likely from the 15th century, since restored. The paintings on and around the fireplace are 19th-century copies. Montesquieu probably never saw this decoration, which was hidden under plaster and then tapestries.

"Montesquieu probably never knew this painted cycle, because we think it simply wasn't in fashion anymore."
Isabelle Cazas-Audureau, director, 2021

On one side the hall opens onto a private chapel, with 17th- and 18th-century paintings and a 17th-century altarpiece, and on the other onto the tapestry drawing room.

Through the 19th century, true pilgrims came to La Brède, and Montesquieu's descendants made the reception rooms grander. In the entrance hall, twisted columns replaced the polygonal stone supports that hold up the library, raised slightly to do their job, and the floor and the coffered ceiling with its fleurs-de-lis were finished with care. The Gothic Revival dining room, made from two rooms, has a plan that Prosper de Montesquieu called "a bit odd." It seats eighteen, with china ordered for Charles de Montesquieu and his wife.

Its heating stove celebrates a Lalande ancestor, Gaillard de Lalande, who according to tradition struck down the giant Hernando during the siege of Bordeaux by Alfonso VIII of Castile and saved the city. From the 1870s, the architect Abadie designed the tapestry drawing room for the family, probably where Jeanne de Lartigue's bedroom once was.

Jacqueline de Chabannes, the last descendant of Denise de Secondat, lived at La Brède, in that same tapestry drawing room, which still has her radio, her television, the portrait of her mother Alice and one of the Queen Mother, Elizabeth, whom she hosted there in 1977. She created the foundation that bears her name, owner of the château since 2004, so that the estate would be restored, opened to the public and given a cultural life worthy of Montesquieu's name. The whole estate has been listed as a historic monument by the French state since 2008. In 2021, the château is open to visitors, from the entrance hall to the writer's bedroom and library.