Château de La Rochefoucauld

The La Rochefoucauld family traces its history back to 980, when Foucauld I settled on his rock, the roche that gave the place its name. A document mentions him in 1019, and the keep dates from around 1030. Since then, the Château de La Rochefoucauld has never changed owners and has passed from one generation to the next. Its lords belonged to the nobility of the sword: from the Middle Ages to the late 19th century, they were soldiers.

During the Hundred Years' War, Charles VII made camp at La Rochefoucauld, and it was here that he learned of the victory at Castillon, which ended the war. The barony became a county in 1515, by grace of Francis I, then a duchy and peerage in 1622, under Louis XIII.

At La Rochefoucauld, the Renaissance arrived through a baptism. François I de La Rochefoucauld stood as godfather to the young count of Angoulême and gave him his first name: the boy became King Francis I. His son, François II de La Rochefoucauld, fought in all the Italian Wars beside the king and shared his captivity after the defeat at Pavia. He married Anne de Polignac, who had been partly raised in Italy. With the English driven out, the fortress no longer had to defend itself. The couple opened it to the outside world and dressed it with two Renaissance facades, stacked galleries and a chapel.

The grand ceremonial staircase, traditionally attributed to Leonardo da Vinci, is a technical feat. More than a hundred steps, each cut from a single block, wind around a central pillar from the kitchens to the attic. Small carved figures, each one different, bring it to life: a pelican piercing its own heart to feed its young, a symbol of Christ, the salamander of Francis I and, at the very top, a court jester whose presence remains a mystery.

"You could say that in every masterpiece, because this staircase really is a masterpiece […] there's a touch of madness, which of course can be represented by this figure."
Michèle de La Rochefoucauld, owner's family, 2024

A boudoir with 16th-century coffered ceilings bears the name of Marguerite d'Angoulême, sister of Francis I, who is said to have come here to write her poems, the Marguerites.

François VI de La Rochefoucauld, author of the Maxims, the famous collection of sharp moral sayings, lived in a small tower of the château. There, recently restored paintings in the window recesses pair his arms with those of his wife, Andrée de Vivonne. His father, François V, the first duc de La Rochefoucauld, has his portrait in the dining room.

A painting attributed to Jean Cotelle, painted at the now-vanished Château de Choisy-le-Roi, shows the family of Louvois, Louis XIV's powerful war minister. Each figure is numbered, with the name written on the back. François VIII de La Rochefoucauld is shown seated, a privilege of dukes, beside his wife, Madeleine-Charlotte Le Tellier, Louvois's daughter. The ladies wear their hair à la Fontanges. The style was born, so the story goes, when Mademoiselle de Fontanges tied up her windblown hair with a lace garter during a hunt with Louis XIV. The painting has been lent twice to the Palace of Versailles, for an exhibition on Le Nôtre and another on Jean Cotelle.

In the 18th century, the La Rochefoucauld line was close to dying out. Louis XV granted an exceptional dispensation so that two sisters could each marry a cousin or an uncle of the same name. One of them, Marie-Louise-Nicole, duchesse d'Enville, widowed very young and never remarried, kept a salon at La Roche-Guyon that drew Diderot and d'Alembert, Voltaire, Turgot, Condorcet and Benjamin Franklin, then the American envoy to France.

Her son, Louis-Alexandre de La Rochefoucauld, whose portrait hangs at the château, embraced the ideas of the Enlightenment. He worked with the abbé Grégoire for the emancipation of Black people and, with Franklin, translated the constitutions of the thirteen American states. Elected for the nobility to the Estates General of 1789 along with his first cousin, he favored a constitutional monarchy. In 1792 he was stoned to death at Gisors, in front of his mother and his wife. That same year, two bishops of the family, the bishop of Saintes and the bishop of Beauvais, were massacred for refusing to renounce their faith.

Louis-Alexandre's cousin, François XII de La Rochefoucauld, duc de Liancourt (1747-1827), was grand master of the wardrobe to Louis XVI. In 1780 he founded a school on his Liancourt estate for the orphans of his regiment, the origin of the École des arts et métiers, France's great engineering school.

"He didn't want to do charity anymore, he wanted to educate people so they could earn a living from their work."
Michèle de La Rochefoucauld, owner's family, 2024

On July 14, 1789, the day the Bastille fell, he galloped from Paris to Versailles to wake the king. When Louis XVI spoke of a revolt, he answered: "No, Sire, it is a revolution." On July 10, 1792, he lent the imprisoned king 190,000 livres tournois. The archives at La Rochefoucauld keep the 1828 letter that, a year after his death, claimed thirty-six years of interest from the steward of Charles X.

He went into exile in England with the agronomist Arthur Young and took an interest in Jenner's work on vaccination, then landed in Philadelphia, where he met up with Talleyrand and Noailles, and traveled across the United States. Back in France in 1799, he published his travel journals, now in the National Archives, organized free vaccination sessions, looked into prisons and hospitals, founded the first mutual aid societies and co-founded the Caisse d'épargne, France's first savings bank.

The library at La Rochefoucauld, built by François XII from the books he inherited from his parents, holds some 20,000 volumes. Packed in crates and sent to England or Switzerland, the great aristocratic libraries escaped the fires of the Revolution. This is a working library that reflects the Enlightenment. It brings together treatises on agriculture and industry, the classics of La Fontaine, Racine, Molière and Corneille, religious books, the bulletins of laws from the Revolution to the Restoration and the proceedings of the National Assembly of 1789. The books printed before the Revolution carry the family's arms and the line "with the approval and privilege of the king."

"You see, in 1789 people didn't just talk about rights, they also talked about the duties of the citizen."
Michèle de La Rochefoucauld, owner's family, 2024

A small tower holds the complete set of Diderot and d'Alembert's Encyclopédie bought by François XII, 17 volumes of text and 11 of plates published between 1751 and 1772. The archive room, created by Sonia de La Rochefoucauld with the state architect for historic monuments, keeps a 1783 inventory of the French Crown Jewels listing Louis XIV's great blue diamond, valued at a million livres, the 1786 catalog of the comte d'Artois's painting collection and a Neptune oriental, a maritime atlas dedicated to the king. A map room holds sea charts and battle plans inherited by the family.

In the late 19th century, François XVI de La Rochefoucauld and his American wife, Mathilde Mitchell, installed a monumental fireplace in the great drawing room, with its 17th-century paneling. It hides another, Renaissance fireplace. Their only son, François Marie-Joseph, died as a child in 1909. The Renaissance chapel, still consecrated, was restored and dedicated to him. His initials decorate the small gallery, and the Christ Child held by the Virgin above his tomb has his features. The early 20th-century stained glass shows the Virgin of the Assumption, Saint Elizabeth of Hungary and Saint Margaret of Antioch. The inheritance then passed to Alfred-Gabriel de La Rochefoucauld.

Later, Edmée de La Rochefoucauld, a writer, a member of the Prix Femina jury and a speaker around the world for women's right to vote, kept a literary salon in Paris, where she received the poet Paul Valéry, whose portrait she made. Her family portraits, painted at the Château de Montmirail, then owned by the La Rochefoucauld family, hang at the château.

The Château de La Rochefoucauld and its park have been listed as a historic monument by the French state since 1955. In 2024, the family opens it to the public every day except Tuesday. Visitors explore on their own, with explanations in every room, while the libraries and the archive room are shown on guided tours. At the château, portraits of the new generation have joined those of the ancestors.