Château de Lunéville

No record of a settlement at Lunéville predates the end of the 10th century, when the site belonged to the episcopal counts of Metz. Count Folmar had a castrum built to control the crossing of the Vezouze on the salt route from Vic-sur-Seille towards Alsace. In the second half of the 12th century the land passed to a younger branch of the Folmars under Hugues de Bliescastel, who took the title Hugues I de Lunéville; his line replaced the castrum with a true castle, a quadrangular block with corner towers beside the Vezouze, ringed on three sides by a wet ditch. In 1243 the lordship entered the domain of Duke Mathieu II of Lorraine.

The dukes lodged there throughout the Middle Ages, and Duke Raoul founded a castle chapel in 1343. Charles the Bold's Burgundians occupied Lunéville in 1476, and the dukes, often absent, let the building decay until René II repaired it at the end of the century. Charles III gave the town a bastioned enceinte between about 1587 and 1591, shutting the castle off behind a further line of defence; by the end of his reign the castle itself was badly damaged, a tower threatening to fall.

Henri II decided to rebuild outright, making Lunéville one of his principal residences. Plans were drawn from 1609 and the work carried out by Jean La Hiere, ending about 1620; the medieval castle went piecemeal as the new U-plan house rose, and by 1630 only an old range and a ruinous tower survived. It was lived in barely twenty years: it burned in the conflict with France that brought the siege of Lunéville in 1638 and then the demolition of the town's fortifications.

The Thirty Years' War kept Lorraine from its lawful sovereigns until the Treaty of Ryswick restored the duchy to Léopold in 1697, and he set repairs going there the next year. In 1702, at the opening of the War of the Spanish Succession, Louis XIV's troops occupied the neutral duchy and held Nancy until 1714; refusing the occupation, Léopold withdrew to Lunéville. His court was too large for the old house, so it was demolished, and from 1703 an immense rebuilding took its place: Pierre Bourdict made the avant-cour to 1705, Nicolas Dorbay directed a second campaign from 1708 to 1718, and the third and largest began after fire broke out on the night of 3 January 1719 destroying the south-east quarter with the ducal apartments.

Germain Boffrand, who had shown plans to the Académie in 1709 and became the duke's first architect in 1711, redrew the scheme after the fire; short of the funds he had hoped for, Léopold wanted the burnt wing put back as it had been. His H-plan was never finished: the north wing along the Vezouze went unbuilt, and only the southern half of the palace, with most of the state rooms and royal apartments facing the garden, was completed. The court settled in for good in 1723; Léopold died on 27 March 1729 and work stopped.

Léopold's heir François III was obliged to cede the duchies for life to Stanislas Leszczyński, the twice-dethroned king of Poland and Louis XV's father-in-law, who reached Lunéville on 3 April 1737. The Treaty of Vienna of 1738 gave him Lorraine and Bar on terms that would carry both into the French royal domain at his death; effective government went to the chancellor Chaumont de La Galaizière, who prepared the duchies for the end of their independence.

Stanislas left the architecture alone, rearranging and refurnishing rooms whose fittings had been taken down on François III's orders, and put his building into the park: on marshy ground bought beside the Vezouze in 1738 and 1739 he laid out the Nouveaux Bosquets, and around 1739–40 Emmanuel Héré built him six cottages, the chartreuses, on the island between the river's arms, where his mistress and other favourites grew produce for him. He died at Lunéville in an accident in February 1766, and the duchy was annexed to France.

Louis XV set about demolishing many Lorraine castles, but Lunéville was kept and turned into a barracks; a number of its buildings disappeared under military use. It was listed as a monument historique in 1901, the chapel first, and in full in 1998. On the night of 2 to 3 January 2003 fire ravaged it: the plaster vault of the chapelle royale collapsed and the flames ran through the attics, destroying the roof over much of it. Restoration has gone on since; the princely apartments are in the care of the Ministry of Defence, the structure that of the Conseil départemental de Meurthe-et-Moselle, which has owned the château since 2017.