Château de Brissac

The castle at Brissac was raised in the 11th century by Foulques Nerra, Count of Anjou. After Philip Augustus defeated the English, the king handed the place to his seneschal Guillaume des Roches. It was bought in 1435 and rebuilt from 1455 by Pierre de Brézé, chief minister to Charles VII, who died at the Battle of Montlhéry saving the king's life.

Brissac passed to his son Jacques de Brézé, who lived there with his wife Charlotte de Valois, daughter of Charles VII and Agnès Sorel. On 1 June 1477, having discovered her affair with his friend Pierre de Lavergne, Jacques ran the pair through with his sword; a legend has grown since that Charlotte walks the château as a white lady on stormy nights.

The property came to René de Cossé during the reign of Francis I, who made him governor of Anjou and Maine; the family took the name Brissac with it. In the Wars of Religion, René's grandson Charles de Cossé held for the Catholic League, and the château was besieged by Henri IV. Charles came over to the king in 1594, and when he saw the place again in 1606 he found it gravely damaged — so badly that the fortress was close to being pulled down.

Instead the king made him a marshal of France and, in 1611, Duke of Brissac, with the money to rebuild. The work was directed by the architect Jacques Corbineau and produced the tallest château in France: seven levels and some 204 rooms behind a façade carrying the Baroque influences of the 17th century. Two towers on the eastern face survive from the 15th-century castle.

On 13 August 1620 Brissac was chosen as neutral ground for the first meeting between Louis XIII and his mother, Marie de Médicis, who were then at odds. Three days of festivities and several private conversations produced a solemn reconciliation; the truce did not hold long, and the queen mother was in the end banished.

The Cossé-Brissac held the château until 1792. In the Revolution it was requisitioned as billets for the ‘Bleus’ campaigning in the Vendée and then sacked, and it stayed in that state until a restoration programme began in 1844 — carried on by the Cossé-Brissac, to whom the château had been returned after the Revolution, and by their successors.

A theatre on two levels was inaugurated in 1890 by the owner Jeanne-Marie Say (1848–1916), granddaughter of the sugar refiner Louis Say and widow of Roland de Cossé, marquis de Brissac; it was restored around 1983. In 1950 Jean Morin, prefect of Maine-et-Loire, proposed a theatrical performance at the château, and the production staged by René Rabault became the first of what grew into the Festival d'Anjou. The house is run now by Charles-André de Cossé, 14th Duke of Brissac, born in 1962, elder son of the 13th Duke, who died in 2021.

The Duke of Brissac offered the château as a refuge for works of art, and in 1939–40 it took in the furniture of Versailles, kept there until 1946 by the wife of Gaston Brière, the palace's former curator. With it came holdings from the Gustave Moreau, Nissim de Camondo and Arts Décoratifs museums, from the Élysée and the Senate, the Comédie-Française, the Swiss legation and the Argentine and British embassies, the treasure of Angers cathedral, and 65 private collections, among them those of André Lhote, Maurice Denis and Paul Valéry.

Brière's report records that five German soldiers burst into the château in August 1944 and killed the caretaker, J.-B. Faucher.