Timeline

Heritage classified

Key figures

Origin and history

The Château de Nuits, located in the Yonne in Nuits-sur-Armançon, is a Renaissance building built in the second half of the 16th century (circa 1560-1570) by François de Chenu, Baron de Nuits. Raised in the midst of religious wars, it embodies a civil architecture adapted to the defence, with murders, ditches and traces of artillery fire still visible. Its strategic position, at the limit of the former provinces of Champagne and Burgundy, made it a key bastion to control the Armançon valley, often borrowed by armed bands.

From 1689 to the French Revolution, the castle belonged to the Clugny family, including Jean Étienne Bernard de Clugny, Comptroller General of Finance, and received personalities such as the future Marshal Davout and the naturalist Buffon. Sold as a national property in 1789, the house was bought in 1806 by the Marquise de La Guiche, which transformed the military bastion into an elegant residence, before perishing in a fire in 1822. The castle suffered damage during the Second World War, but a meticulous restoration of the interiors had been under way for two decades.

Ranked a Historic Monument in 1967, the castle combines an austere oriental facade, marked by its defensive role (walls of 5 to 7 m thick, shooting esplanade), and a more elegant western facade, decorated with pilasters and skylights. Inside, the noble floor preserves 16th century chimneys, an Empire room where Davout stayed, and a cabinet where Buffon wrote chapters of his Natural History. The park, inspired by the English gardens, was designed by Louis-Martin Berthault, a landscape architect of Josephine and then Napoleon.

Today, the castle opens twenty-two rooms to the public, including a guard room, a chapel, and spaces bearing witness to the aristocratic life of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The exhibits (dish, clothing, toys) and restored family memories illustrate the evolution of a seigneurial residence in a bourgeois residence, between military heritage and adaptations to successive lifestyles.

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