Château de la Grange-Bléneau

La Grange-Bléneau was the seat of a seigneurie held of the castellany of Melun, the place appearing as Corpaloi from the thirteenth century. In 1363 the knight Ancel de La Grange set out his holding in a feudal declaration: his "maison fort de la Grange, chastel, pourpris et appartenances" with all its ditches, its bailey and its dovecote, and a settlement enclosed by ditches; the house and castle, he wrote, were a "forteresse ancienne". Drawings attached to that declaration show an enclosure of 35 by 24 metres with five towers. The lordship carried high, middle and low justice on the river Ierre from the bridge of Rozay to near the mill of Courtemer, with fines for anyone caught fishing there without right.

The lordship passed through the Courtenay, the Aubusson-La Feuillade, the Dupré de La Grange Blesneau and the d'Aguesseau. During the troubles of Louis XIII's minority the Prince de Condé and his troops seized the house. The buildings that stand are mostly sixteenth-century work, later remodelled: three ranges flanked by five round towers of the fifteenth century, a vaulted entrance between two turrets, where a drawbridge once spanned the ditches, and a chapel.

Ownership came down from Henriette d'Aguesseau to her daughter Adrienne, and from Adrienne to her husband, General Gilbert du Motier, marquis de Lafayette, who lived at La Grange from 1802 until his death in 1834. At Lafayette's request Hubert Robert worked with Antoine Vaudoyer on the laying out of the gardens. The house was left much as he had it, and still holds his library along with archives and souvenirs bearing on American independence.

Eight years after Lafayette's death his grandson Jules de Lasteyrie (1810-1883) married Olivia de Rohan-Chabot (1813-1899), daughter of the émigré Louis de Rohan, vicomte de Chabot, and of Lady Charlotte Fitzgerald, herself a daughter of the second Duke of Leinster; the couple lived at La Grange-Bléneau for fifty-four years. Their son Louis de Lasteyrie sold the house in 1935 to his cousin René de Chambrun, with a life tenancy. On his cousin's death in 1955 Chambrun found a large cache of documents in the attic and set up a private Lafayette museum; he sorted and described the family archives, which run from 1457 to 1990, and the papers were microfilmed at La Grange in 1995 and 1996 for the Library of Congress. Those Lafayette papers were classified as historical archives in 2003.

The château and its chapel were listed as monuments historiques by decree of 15 April 1942. The house belongs to the Fondation Josée-et-René-de-Chambrun, recognised as serving the public interest on 19 October 1959 and charged with keeping the château and the historical collections attached to Lafayette's memory. Its founders were René de Chambrun (1906-2002), a lawyer at the Paris appeal court and the New York bar and a descendant of Lafayette, and his wife Josée Laval (1911-1992), only daughter of the collaborator Pierre Laval; the foundation also holds Pierre Laval's private papers and the château de Châteldon. Its seat was moved from Courpalay to Paris by an order of 18 December 2003.