Timeline

Heritage classified

Key figures

Origin and history

The Hotel de Peyrat, located in Pézenas, Occitanie, is a hybrid monument combining a medieval tower — a vestige of the city's ramparts, with a vaulted hall with carved capes — and a 17th century mansion. The tower, known as the prison tower, preserves dungeons in its basements and a characteristic eastern bay. It was restored around 1600 when the fortifications resumed, and then rebuilt in the early 17th century to incorporate a house developing on several levels, including deep basements.

Jean de Peyrat, king's adviser and chamber secretary, inherited the property in 1633 and undertook a major structuring campaign between 1635 and 1640. It enlarged the building by one third from its original size, setting up the Court of Justice for the punishment. The lower parts and the medieval tower are then converted into jails, connected by a staircase to a large audience hall — originally covered with a French floor decorated with rinceaux and painted medallions. A guard room, a monumental golden wooden fireplace, and a vaulted vestibule complete this judicial development.

The exterior facades, originally opened on the old ditch of the city (now the Place des Etats-de-Languedoc), are mentioned in the 1688 Compoix. Their arrangement, with a door flanked by schauguettes and an arcade gallery, could precede the work of Jean de Peyrat: as early as 1632, his heirs obtained permission to open windows on the ditch. Inside, recently rediscovered wall paintings in the gallery represent in trompe-l'oeil the Twelve Caesars, executed in grey camaieu on a base with cut leathers. These sets, like the graffiti of the dungeons, testify to the hotel's mixed use (residential and prison).

In the 18th century, the building underwent major changes: the openings were reoriented to the outside of the city, the ground floor was raised to adapt to the elevation of the State Square, and the tower was raised. The interior spaces are partitioned, including the audience hall, where a gypsum fireplace partially replaces the previous decorations. The hotel, fragmented from the middle of the century, changed hands several times: the lawyer Pierre Sales acquired most of it in 1752, before successive divisions (including sales to the prince of Conti in 1779 and to Paul Canonge in 1780).

The history of the hotel is inextricably linked to a piecemeal reshuffle that began in 1556, when the tower was ceded by the community of Pézenas to Jean Robert and then bought by Antoine Peyrat. The latter, then his descendant Jean de Peyrat, gradually unifies plots to form an imposing house, backed by the ancient medieval courtine. The later transformations, though numerous, did not, however, erase the traces of the judicial arrangements of the seventeenth century, nor the medieval remains of the tower.

Ranked a Historic Monument in 1994 (for the tower and the ancient parts), the hotel illustrates the evolution of an urban space between the Middle Ages and the modern era, where defensive, judicial and residential functions overlap. The painted decorations, the graffiti of the dungeons, and the architectural structures (ogival vaults, monumental chimneys) make this a rare testimony of this transition.

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