Château de Commarque

Commarque was founded during the 12th century, or possibly a little before, at the request of the abbots of Sarlat, and was then no more than a wooden tower on its rocky spur above the Beune. Its business was to protect the abbey, to check the ambitions of the Beynac family and to keep the valley safe, standing where two important trading roads crossed: Périgueux to Cahors, and Brive to Bergerac.

Gérard de Commarque began an enlarged castle, then entered the Knights Hospitaller in 1116 as one of the order's earliest members and left for Jerusalem on crusade, making over his property to the Hospitallers. In the 12th century the spur carried a whole settlement — a keep with a lordly lodging, a free-standing chapel and a group of tower-houses, the semi-troglodytic castrum of Commarque.

Once the Beynac family had made itself master of the castle, the wooden tower gave way to a stone keep, raised higher several times — notably in 1380 — and crowned with machicolations. The Beynacs, lords of the place, lived in that seigneurial keep. Other towers followed, each with its own hall, held by lineages of the minor nobility whose names are partly known: the Commarque, the Cendrieux, the Gondrix, the La Chapelle. Every tower-house had its own enclosure, its own entrance and its own ditches.

A ravine defends the north and east sides; on the others a deep ditch was cut into the rock, with the towers and keep placed to bar the way in. The fortress proper occupies the point of the rock, cut off by those rock-cut ditches and reached through a 13th-century barbican and a 14th-century ravelin. Across the Beune stands the château de Laussel, which the English occupied in the Middle Ages.

Through the Hundred Years' War the Beynacs remained faithful defenders of the French crown. The English nonetheless seized Commarque in 1406 and held it for some years; the decline of the Beynac family dates from that time. By the 1500s the castrum appears to have been deserted by its old resident families. In 1569 it was taken again, this time by the Catholics during the Wars of Religion, the Beynacs being partisans of the Protestant side. The vaulted hall probably fell in around the same period. Guy de Beynac, the last châtelain of Commarque, died there in 1656.

The site was abandoned for good in the 18th century and a hundred years later the castle was a ruin. Before the First World War the ruins were bought to serve as a stone quarry for the neo-Gothic wings of a château near Sarlat. The castle had passed in the 1900s to a German owner, the Prince de Croÿ, whose heirs were many.

In August 1915 the abbé Henri Breuil found the decorated prehistoric cave in the cliff beneath the keep, holding 150 figures engraved 15,000 years ago in the Magdalenian; the cave was classified as a monument historique in 1924. The castle itself was classified by decree of 2 September 1943.

It took Hubert de Commarque ten years to buy the ruins out from the Croÿ heirs, which he did in 1968. A descendant of the Commarque family, raised at the château de la Bourlie and the son of a Resistance member deported to Buchenwald, he found the site wholly under vegetation and set about consolidating the worst-damaged parts. Campaigns of consolidation and restoration have followed since 1994, and two thorough studies of the castrum in the 1990s and 2000s traced masonry phases running from the 12th century to the 17th.

The castle has been open to visitors since 2000, with concerts, medieval events, exhibitions and seminars run to pay for the restoration; it drew 60,000 visitors in 2022, among the most visited in the Dordogne. The approach is a stony track and then some 600 metres of woodland path, awkward enough that the castle is known as the "forgotten fortress". Ridley Scott filmed the final duel of The Duellists in the ruins in 1977, and the television adaptation of Robert Merle's Fortune de France was shot there in 2023. Since 2023 Jean and Aude de Commarque have taken over the work from their father.