Château de Biron

Archaeological evidence places the first castle on the rock above Biron somewhere around the year 1000, between the end of the tenth century and the middle of the eleventh. Its lords appear in written record at the end of the eleventh century as vassals of the count of Toulouse. Set on a huge rocky knoll well away from any river, in the valley of the Lède at the edge of Périgord, Biron became the seat of one of the four baronies of that country, and one of the oldest baronies of Périgord along with the castles of Beynac, Bourdeilles and Mareuil.

In the second half of the twelfth century, under Henry Plantagenet, duke of Aquitaine and king of England, the Birons had an imposing tower raised. Before that century was out they gave up the site to their descendants the Gontaut-Biron and went to live at Montferrand-du-Périgord, in a house they already held and later turned into a château of its own. Under Plantagenet and Gontaut patronage the castle was heavily remodelled: the lower court was ringed with a curtain wall flanked by towers, and the town at the foot of the rock was fortified.

In 1211 Biron was taken by the Albigensians, who gave it to Martin Algais, a Spanish captain and mercenary then in the service of the king of England and afterwards in that of Simon de Montfort, 5th Earl of Leicester, the principal commander of the crusade against them. When Algais betrayed Montfort and went over to the count of Toulouse, Montfort seized the castle, had Algais hanged, and entrusted Biron to Arnaud de Montagu; the recapture is dated to the year after the Albigensians took the place.

In 1222 King Henry III sold the castle to Henri de Gontaut, and Biron passed to the family that had taken its name from it and would hold it into the twentieth century.

The English held Biron at intervals during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, taking and sacking it. The family's fortunes recovered with Pons de Gontaut-Biron, who died in 1524 and who turned the medieval fortress into a comfortable residence. To regain his rank he married Marguerite de Montferrand, a kinswoman of his.

It was Pons who raised the two-storey chapel of 1515, the upper level for the people of the castle and the lower for the villagers whose houses huddled at the foot of the butte. He built it as the dynastic sanctuary, to receive his own tomb and that of his brother Armand, bishop of Sarlat, who died in 1531. Both tombs are still there, although the heads of the recumbent effigies were hammered off at some point, either in the wars of religion or during the Revolution. Until the end of the nineteenth century the chapel also held two sculpted groups, a dead Christ on the knees of the Virgin standing as a retable above the altar and a Descent from the Cross; both were sold and have been in the Metropolitan Museum in New York at least since 1914.

Pons's son Jean de Gontaut Biron (1502–1557) married a Bonneval, out of a great Limousin family, and was introduced at court, where he afterwards fell into disgrace with François I. Jean's son Armand de Gontaut Biron (1524–1592) became a Marshal of France and the unconditional support of the Valois and of Catholicism in a region largely won over to the Reformation. He was killed in the fighting of the League and did not live to see the end of the transformation of the château he had begun.

Biron was erected as a duché-pairie in 1598 for Armand's son Charles, created duc de Biron. Charles (1562–1602) fell from favour and was executed under Henri IV, and his father's work on the castle was left unfinished.

In the eighteenth century Charles Armand de Gontaut-Biron modernised the château. His son Charles Antoine de Gontaut Biron, 7th duc de Biron, died in 1798 without issue, the last descendant of the elder branch. The castle was sacked during the Terror, but it remained in the family's possession.

Early in the nineteenth century it was bought by the Saint-Blancard branch of the house of Gontaut, which had split from the ducal line at the beginning of the seventeenth century; that branch took the name Biron and kept the château until 1938. Guillaume de Gontaut (1859–1939), from 1883 marquis de Saint-Blancard et de Biron and known simply as the marquis de Biron, is reputed to have given his name to the high-antiques quarter of the Saint-Ouen flea market in Paris. Anne-Charles de Gontaut, born in 1963, is the present bearer of the title.

The Copper-Royer family bought Biron in 1938 and held it for forty years; Jacqueline Copper-Royer recorded parts of the castle in drawings and prints in 1950 and 1952. A violent hailstorm on 30 May 1974 did heavy damage to the roofs of the buildings, and in 1978 it was a badly dilapidated ensemble that passed into public hands for restoration. In 1980 the Amis du château de Biron, with Béatrice Gonzalez de Andia (1933–2024), obtained from the Ministry of Culture the funds needed for the most urgent repairs, and in 2012 work began on the roof structure of the aile des Maréchaux, planned over two years at a cost of 2.3 million euros. Classified as a monument historique by the order of 17 February 1928, with the gardens, the park and two fountains west of the castle inscribed on 31 December 1992, Biron is open to the public and drew 53,000 visitors in 2022.