Château de Châteauneuf

The square keep is dated to 1132, when Jean de Chaudenay is said to have raised it for his younger son Jehan. Jehan took possession in 1175 and became Jean I de Châteauneuf. Of that first castle only the keep survives.

The site is a limestone balcony standing about a hundred metres above the depression of the Auxois, 475 metres above the plains and 43 km from Dijon. From it the lords watched the obligatory passage of a road that climbed from the Sequanian slope by the Armançon and dropped again towards the valley of the Ouche, Dijon and the Saône.

Facing the threat of the Hundred Years' War, the lords of Châteauneuf built the powerful enceinte that still rings the 12th-century keep, an oblong circuit of towers and curtain walls following the break of slope, with a small fortified village behind it covering the approach from the plateau. The finished fortress runs 75 metres long by 35 broad.

The family's rule ended after nine generations, and ended badly. Catherine de Châteauneuf, daughter of Isabelle de Plancy and Guyot de Châteauneuf and the last heiress of the line, was burnt alive in 1456 for poisoning her second husband, Jacques d'Haussonville, sire de Montreuil.

In 1457 Philippe le Bon, Duke of Burgundy, made over the fortress to his counsellor Philippe Pot, a knight of the Order of the Golden Fleece and a knight of Saint Michael. Pot recast the place as a residence fit for the splendours of the ducal court: a chapel dedicated to Notre-Dame and Saint Jean was consecrated in 1481, and two lodgings - the great logis against the curtain and the south-east tower, and the second known as the logis of Philippe Pot - went up in the courtyard in flamboyant Gothic. The south-east curtain was opened to take a gate with a drawbridge. Pot's device, "Tant L Vault", is cut in many places about the castle.

Philippe Pot died in 1493 without descendants, and Châteauneuf passed to his brother Guy Pot.

Through Montmorency and Luxembourg-Piney marriages the castle descended to Marie-Liesse de Luxembourg-Piney. When she entered the Carmelite convent at Avignon in 1649 it went to Charles I de Vienne-Ruffey, count of Commarin, who had bought it in September 1627; his family held it for the next hundred and fifty years, fitting out apartments and remaking the front of the logis.

In 1767 Louis-Henri de Vienne-Commarin sold the castle to the banker Jean Pâris de Montmartel and his son Armand Pâris de Brunoy. Armand died without issue, and Châteauneuf was bought for 370,000 livres by Jacques-François Damas d'Antigny, baron de Ruffey and de Chevreaux, from whose line it descended to the Vogüé. During the French Revolution every royal symbol and coat of arms on the building was defaced or destroyed.

After the Revolution the castle was auctioned and passed from hand to hand until 1936. It was classified as a monument historique by decree of 10 December 1894, and in 1902 Charles Suisse, the architect of the restoration of La Rochepot, consolidated the fabric. In 1936 Count Georges de Vogüé ceded the fortress to the state.

On 26 August 1939, ahead of France's declaration of war on Germany, the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Dijon closed and a convoy of works set out for the castle under a plan drawn up in 1936 by the Direction des Musées de France. Ten journeys put the museum's 912 most important works out of reach, along with the most precious documents of Dijon's municipal library and the departmental archives of the Côte-d'Or.

Refits of the first-floor rooms and several campaigns of works followed in the last quarter of the 20th century, among them a new roof over the Philippe Pot logis. A convention signed on 14 September 2007 transferred the property to the regional council of Burgundy, owner since 2008 and responsible for its restoration and its programme of events.