Château de la Napoule

A castrum is first mentioned here in the 9th century, under the name Avignonet, in the hands of the bishops of Fréjus and Antibes. The name La Napoule first appears in 1134, in a donation to the bishop of Antibes, and a castle was raised on Mont San-Peyre in the 12th century. When the see of Antibes moved to Grasse in 1244 the bishop's rights passed to the cathedral chapter, and in 1284 the abbey of Lérins enfeoffed its own share to a neighbouring lay lord, Raymond de Fayence of the Villeneuve-Tourettes, whose family held the seigneurie until the 17th century.

In 1387 Raimond de Turenne, at war with the counts of Provence, took and destroyed the castle on Mont San-Peyre; by letters patent of 17 July that year Marie de Blois, countess of Provence and guardian of Louis II of Anjou, granted La Napoule, Tourettes, Mons and Esclapon to Guillaume de Villeneuve, whom tradition makes the builder from nothing of the new castle beside the sea. It stood in a lordship still shared with the chapter of Grasse: on 9 April 1415 the viguier and captain of Grasse authorised a tower and walls at La Napoule.

King René is said to have ordered the demolition of the village, which sheltered pirates by land and sea; in 1459 Antoine de Villeneuve-Tourettes brought settlers from the Oneille valley to found a new town. His charter of franchise of 20 May 1461 bound him to keep watch day and night on the castle towers while the townsmen watched the gates, and the defences were strengthened against attack from the sea. It was not enough. In 1530 the corsair Kheir-ed-Din, called Barbarossa, sacked La Napoule and left it depopulated, and in 1589–90 the Savoyard army of Duke Charles-Emmanuel attacked the castle, then held by David de Villeneuve-Tourettes; the neighbouring castles of Tourettes and Mons were also partly destroyed, the latter by Savoyard artillery under the engineer Ascanio Vitozzi. In 1608 Jean III de Villeneuve counted fifty small houses and others ruined and broken, the town walled but its entrances mere doorways without gates or defence.

Savoy returned in 1707, when the troops of Victor-Amadeus II sacked the castle during the War of the Spanish Succession, and the indebted Pierre-Jean de Villeneuve put the seigneurie up for sale; the memoir written for it describes a castle on a rock at the sea's edge with two very strong ancient towers, whose purpose had been to defend the village against the Moors of Africa. Dominique de Montgrand bought it on 21 March 1719; his son Jean-Baptiste, commander-general of the Provençal coastguard militias, could not stop the Austro-Sardinian armies sacking the castle in 1746 during the War of the Austrian Succession.

Joseph Jean-Baptiste de Montgrand, who died in January 1789, was the last seigneur; the lands were sold as émigré property and the castle abandoned and pillaged through the Revolution. The family bought the estate back in 1815, but in 1837 its owner licensed a glassworks inside the walls, and what remained of the roof timbers went into the furnaces as fuel. The ruins were sold in 1876 to Charrier, a perfumer of Grasse, who from 1878 had them pulled down and a maison de maître built in their place on the seafront, finished in 1880.

In November 1918 two Americans bought what was left. Henry Clews (1876–1937), a sculptor and the son of a New York banker, and his wife Elsie Whelen — Marie Clews (1880–1959) — moved in during 1919 and lived there until 1930 as their own patrons and designers: he carved, she drew the alterations, working directly with the local masons Jean and César Cossano and twelve stonecutters. They built neo-medieval without any archaeological enquiry, and Henry cut fairy-tale mottoes into the stone — Once upon a time; Myth, Mystery, Mirth. A sculpture studio went up beside the Grande Tour in 1919, a knights' dining hall in 1924–28 with a machicolated tower on the base of the medieval south-west tower, and the detached tower of La Mancha in 1927. Work stopped in 1930.

In 1943 the German army took the castle into the Südwall battery network and built a camouflaged blockhouse north-east of the garden, destroying part of its wall. Henry was dead by then; Marie stayed on, serving the soldiers as a maid among the castle's staff so that she could remain close to her home and her husband's memory. The château and its gardens were inscribed as monuments historiques by decree of 6 January 1947; she rebuilt the wall in 1950 and in 1951 founded the art foundation, in her husband's memory, that owns the castle and runs it as a cultural centre.