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Origin and history

The castle of Cussigny, located in Corgoloin (Côte d'Or), is an 18th-century building built around 1742 by Henri-Bénigne de Saint-Belin on the remains of an old strong house mentioned since 1356. This rectangular castle, oriented to the east, was characterized by a central body with pediment flanked by two wings, flat tile roofs decorated with a chronogram "1771", and commons organized around a square courtyard. The facades, roofs (outside a square tower), chapel and dovecote were protected as historical monuments since 1960 and 1965.

The history of the castle is marked by changes of influential owners: past of the families of Cussigny, Nantes, then of Brasey in the 15th century, it was passed on by inheritance to the Saint-Belin until the 18th century. In 1764 Claude Pierre Poulletier de Perrigny became its owner, before Bénigne Antoine Carrelet de Loisy acquired the estate in 1788. The latter removed the north wing and the last corner towers in the early 19th century, thus changing its original appearance.

On July 30, 2023, a fire completely destroyed the castle, destroying the wooden parts and seriously damaging the stone walls. Despite the intervention of forty firefighters, only the dovecote and adjacent communes were spared. The sinister event, when the castle was unoccupied, marked the end of a major architectural heritage of Burgundy-Franche-Comté, already at the heart of local tensions in 2022 because of a controversial holiday village project.

Prior to its destruction, the castle illustrated the Burgundian architecture of the eighteenth century, with its stone bellows, its stone-cut corner chains, and its bays in segmentary arch or full-cintra. The communes, organized in square courtyards, included buildings for agricultural or domestic use, while the dovecote, typical of seigneurial estates, showed the economic importance of the site. The ensemble was representative of the transformations undergone by medieval castles, adapted to the classic cannons under the Old Regime.

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