Château de Bity

A château stood at Bity, at Sarran in the Corrèze, by the sixteenth century. It burned in 1579, during the Wars of Religion, and was rebuilt at the beginning of the seventeenth century by Pierre Dupuy, a counsellor at the présidial court of Tulle.

The Dupuys kept Bity until 1746, when Roch Dupuy, seigneur-curé of Darazac, who held the estate from his brother François Dupuy, seigneur de Bity, left it to his nephew Jean Gabriel Martin La Selve, a squire and royal prosecutor between 1739 and 1762. La Selve was ennobled on 16 May 1749 with the office of counsellor and secretary to the king at the Parlement of Bordeaux, granted for his own service as the king's prosecutor in the maréchaussée of the Limousin and for his father's sixty years before him. His family is said to have held Bity until 1843, before settling at the château de la Gâne.

In 1925 the château was acquired by William Noel Lucas-Shadwell, a former colonel of the British army, an archaeologist, and a member of the British secret service. A persistent rumour attaches Leon Trotsky to the house as Lucas-Shadwell's guest at some point between 1933 and 1935.

During the Second World War the château sheltered members of the French Resistance, and it was later turned into a hospital.

Bity was bought on 3 March 1969 by Jacques and Bernadette Chirac. The choice was hers and her father Jean-Louis Chodron de Courcel's, made after months of searching and despite her husband's want of enthusiasm for houses of the kind. Chirac, then a secretary of state in Couve de Murville's government, had the château classified as a monument historique by decree of 3 April 1969, a status that allowed the later restoration to draw on public funds. Georges Pompidou's remark on the purchase was recorded by Franz-Olivier Giesbert: when you claim to be in politics, you arrange not to own a château, unless it has been in the family since at least Louis XV. Chirac for his part called it a modest building with only eight windows and a hectare of untended ground.

Claude Chirac was married to Philippe Habert at Bity in 1992. In October 1999 her father, president of France from 1995 to 2007, received the Chinese president Jiang Zemin there for a private visit ahead of an official one. In the declaration of assets published in the Journal officiel at the end of his presidency in 2007, Chirac entered the château as a second residence built over cellars, valued at 500,000 euros. An investigation published by France-Soir early in 2011 put the cost to the state of guarding the property at 420,000 euros a year, at a point when Chirac was going there about once a year. In July 2012 François Hollande, by then president, visited him at Bity.