Château de Beynac

The barons of Beynac held one of the four baronies of Périgord — Beynac and Biron in the south, Bourdeilles and Mareuil in the north — and from the 12th century they built on the limestone cliff above the river to close the valley. The drop was defence enough on the water side, so everything went into the plateau approach: a double crenellated enceinte, a double moat, one arm of it a deepened natural ravine, and a double barbican.

The oldest part was a square Romanesque keep, sheer-sided and sparingly pierced, clamped with a brattice and a watch turret, its spiral stair no wider than a buttress and ending on a crenellated terrace. A residence of the same period stood against one side; on the other, a partly 14th-century lodging with a courtyard and a square-plan stair.

Adhémar de Beynac, who took the cross in 1147, died without issue between 1189 and 1194. Richard Cœur de Lion, King of England, then gave Beynac to Mercadier, the routier he trusted. Mercadier was assassinated at Bordeaux in 1200 and the barony returned to the family it had come from, passing to Pons I.

From 1241 the castellany, which included the Château de Commarque, was split between two brothers, Gaillard and Mainard de Beynac, and the two branches were reunited only in 1379, when Philippe de Beynac married her cousin Pons de Beynac, lord of Commarque. Pons V served as seneschal of Périgord.

Through the Hundred Years' War Beynac was a French stronghold, with the Dordogne itself running as the frontier between the fiefs of the king of France and English-held Guyenne. Not far off, on the opposite bank, stood its rival Castelnaud, in English hands. The region became a theatre of struggles for influence, rivalry and occasional battle — but castles of this kind changed hands more often by ruse and intrigue than by assault, since the armies needed to take them cost so much that only the richest nobles and kings could field them.

Guy I was made the first marquis de Beynac in 1620. The hall known as the Salle des États took its name from the assemblies of the nobility of the four baronies held there; it keeps a Renaissance chimneypiece carved with ox-skulls and opens into a small oratory painted in the 15th century with a Pietà, a Saint Christopher and a Last Supper in which Saint Martial, first bishop of Limoges, serves as maître d'hôtel. The older residence was remodelled and enlarged in the 16th and 17th centuries, and the apartments retain their woodwork and a painted 17th-century ceiling.

The male line ended with Pierre, last marquis of Beynac, who died at Bordeaux on 9 October 1753. He had married Anne-Marie Boucher in 1727 and left two daughters: Julie, who married the marquis de Castelnau, and Claude-Marie, who married Christophe Marie de Beaumont du Repaire in 1761. The Beaumont du Repaire family added Beynac to its name, took the courtesy title marquis de Beaumont-Beynac, and held the castle until 1961.

In 1962 Beynac was bought at auction for 170,000 francs by Lucien Grosso, who had made his money in the casinos and nightclubs of Marseille and Abidjan, and who set about restoring it — helped afterwards by Denise, whom he married about a decade on. Childless, the couple decided in 1999 to leave the castle to the senator Albéric de Montgolfier, its present owner. Grosso died on 16 July 2008 at ninety-eight; Denise carried the work on until her own death on 17 February 2016.

The castle, with its curtain walls and terraces, had been classified a monument historique by order of 11 February 1944. It drew 125,000 visitors in 2022, and film crews have used it repeatedly, among them Ever After, Luc Besson's Jeanne d'Arc, Chocolat, Fanfan la Tulipe and Ridley Scott's The Last Duel.