Château de Breteuil

The house that became Breteuil, at Choisel in the valley of Chevreuse, was first called Bévilliers or Buvilliers, a name taken from the two Gallo-Roman villas — bis villae — that had stood on the ground. The seigneury appears in the record in 1142, and the first mention of a manor there in 1560, when the estate belonged to the Le Jay family. The works that gave the logis its present plan are usually put in the 1580s and credited to Nicolas Le Jay, who died in 1585; other historians assign them instead to Thibault Desportes, Grand Audiencier of the Chancellery of France, who bought the estate at auction in 1596.

Through the seventeenth century the estate passed from uncles to nephews, its owners carrying in turn the names Desportes, Chanteclerc, Renouard and finally Breteuil. In 1712 Charles Le Tonnelier de Breteuil inherited from the last of the Renouards, and from that year the domain has descended from father to son. Claude Stanislas Le Tonnelier de Breteuil, born in 1730, remade both house and grounds, laying out a warren grove, green rooms, a kitchen garden and orchard on four terraces, a Chinese pavilion and a ha-ha; the bosquet chimérique he ordered was made between 1772 and March 1773, and its plan is still kept in the château archives.

The family gave three ministers to the kings of France. Gabrielle-Émilie de Breteuil (1706–1749) was a woman of science; Louis Auguste Le Tonnelier de Breteuil served Louis XVI as ambassador and then as minister, and it was he who was charged with arresting Cardinal de Rohan at Versailles on 15 August 1785 in the scandal of the necklace. He was among the closest supporters of the king and Marie-Antoinette. The domain was placed under sequestration during the Revolution, and was taken back by Charles de Breteuil in 1802.

An English garden replaced the eighteenth-century parterre, and between 1820 and 1830 the walls enclosing the courtyard were pulled down and the moats drained. At the end of the century Henry Le Tonnelier de Breteuil, eighth marquis, added two return wings to the rear range, raised the front pavilions and rebuilt the outbuildings, sparing only the dovecote. Between 1897 and 1903 he set the landscape gardeners Henri Duchêne and his son Achille to lay out formal French gardens again, with a mirror of water on the north side looking over the Chevreuse valley.

On 12 March 1881 Henry de Breteuil, then a deputy, brought together at the château, in secret, Léon Gambetta, president of the Chamber of Deputies, and the Prince of Wales, the future Edward VII. The meeting counted in the long diplomatic effort that ended in the Entente Cordiale of 1904.

In 1912 another Prince of Wales, Edward VII's grandson and the future Edward VIII, stayed four months with the Breteuils to improve his French. Five years later, during the Great War, François de Breteuil introduced him to the Parisian courtesan Marguerite Alibert.

From 1967 the château was restored by Henri-François, marquis de Breteuil, and his wife, born Séverine Decazes de Glücksberg, and opened to visitors to meet the cost of the work. Fifty wax figures made by the musée Grévin are set out in the salons and outbuildings, and Janie and Armand Langlois built automata on the tales of Charles Perrault. The house has served as a film set as well, among others for Claude Chabrol's Madame Bovary in 1991. The interior and the park were inscribed as a monument historique by decree of 29 October 1961, and much of the domain, including the façades and roofs and the whole of the 75-hectare park with its statuary, was classified by decree of 16 February 2024; the gardens carry the jardin remarquable label.

In 2014 the marquis sold the Teschen table, a piece classified a national treasure, to the Louvre, which shows it in Paris or at Lens. The Covid-19 pandemic closed the château in 2020 and 2021, the park and some outdoor attractions staying open; against 120,000 visitors in earlier years, takings halved in 2020, the ten staff went onto short-time working and the building of a gîte was put off.