Château de Rochechouart

The castle's history begins around the year 1000, when the viscounts of Limoges fortified a rocky spur above the Graine, at its confluence with the Vayres, in the historic Limousin. Aymeric I Ostofranc, who lived around 990, son of Géraud, viscount of Limoges, is named as the ancestor of the line, and until 1470 the castellany was held as the fief of a cadet branch of the viscounts of Limoges. The viscounts of Rochechouart, vassals of the count of Poitiers, ruled here for 800 years. Aymeric VI, who lived from 1170 to 1230, built the castle that followed the first fortification; of that older work only the entrance châtelet with its drawbridge survives, keeping one of its thirteenth-century towers.

It is to Aymeric VI that the house attached the legend of Alix and the lion. In 1205, by that tradition, his wife Alix was accused of adultery by the castle's steward and shut in the cage of a lion in the east tower. The animal did not devour her but lay down at her feet; she was cleared, the steward was thrown into the cage in her place, and the lion ate him soon after. In the fuller telling handed down by the abbé Duléry, the lion had been given to the viscount during his crusading expedition, and Aymeric is said to have had a stone lion set into the wall of the tower of the oubliettes, called the tour du Lion ever since.

Aymeric IV took part in the First Crusade at the side of Godfrey of Bouillon. Aymeric IX joined the Aragon expedition of 1283 alongside Philip III the Bold. Simon and Jean I fought in Flanders in 1304 and in 1328, beside Philip the Fair and Philip VI of Valois. In 1346 Viscount Jean I was at Crécy, and ten years later he was killed at the battle of Poitiers, defending King John II.

The castle was a centre of resistance to the English during the Hundred Years War: first under Louis, chamberlain to Charles V and a companion-in-arms of Bertrand du Guesclin, then under his son Jean II, and then his grandson Geoffroy, who rode as a companion of Joan of Arc. After that war the castle was rebuilt on a pentagonal plan, and its master tower was the north-west one, now razed.

Viscount Foucaud (1440–1472) was an adviser to Louis XI. In 1470 his only daughter Anne married Jean de Pontville, chamberlain to the king's brother Charles of France, duke of Guyenne, and with that marriage the viscounty passed out of the Rochechouart family, which continued in the lords of Bourdet and of Chandenier. Viscount Jean de Rochechouart-Pontville had the castle restored in the French Renaissance style, and his son François had the hunting room decorated, where polychrome frescoes of a stag hunt date from the beginning of the sixteenth century.

In 1512 François had Pierre Bermondet, lord of Boucheron and of Saint-Laurent-sur-Gorre, murdered for the lands he coveted. The trial that followed was a loud one and it ruined the Pontvilles. By royal judgement the keep was levelled and the standing timber of the estate felled; François was condemned to exile for the murder, and his family was required to raise a funeral monument to the victim at Panazol.

Out of that killing grew the legend of the severed hand. In it, François de Pontville was away hunting when his friend Bermondet de Cromières, a man famous for his beautiful hands, called at the castle and was received by the viscountess. When she praised the visitor's elegant manners and fine hands to her husband, the jealous Pontville is said to have ridden out with a few men, cut the caller down with daggers, severed one of his hands and carried it home in a box, presenting it to his wife with the words: "Madame, here is the object of your idolatry. It is the beautiful hand of the marquis de Cromières!" In the story the Parlement of Paris took up the case and sentenced Pontville and his accomplices to death.

Claude, François's son, had the Hercules room decorated with the grisaille wall paintings of the mid-sixteenth century. He served as a companion-in-arms of the Constable de Montmorency and was wounded and taken prisoner at the battle of Saint-Quentin in 1557. From the Mortemart branch of the family came Françoise-Athénaïs de Rochechouart, better known as Madame de Montespan, the favourite of Louis XIV.

By the middle of the eighteenth century the interior was dilapidated, its floors and windows failing, and the viscounts' family was living at the château des Bâtiments a few kilometres away. The marriage in 1757 of François-Louis de Rochechouart, son of François-Bertrand, baron des Bâtiments and viscount of Rochechouart, who had died in 1742, to Marie-Victoire Boucher, daughter and heiress of a wealthy treasurer-general of the colonies, made restoration possible. During the Revolution an attempt was made to demolish the castle; the revolutionaries got no further than the tops of the two towers framing the south-east front, and in 1793 the building held a prison. Under the Terror the viscountess Marie-Victoire was arrested and imprisoned in Paris, where she was guillotined in 1794.

General Louis-Victor-Léon de Rochechouart, born in 1788 and dead in 1858, served through the Napoleonic wars in the Russian, German and French campaigns, and at the battle of the Berezina; he was afterwards maréchal de camp to Louis XVIII and governor of Paris from 1814 to 1821. He bought the castle in 1825 and sold it in 1836 to the département of the Haute-Vienne, its outbuildings going to the town, in the reign of Louis-Philippe. The département undertook to restore it exactly as it had been, and between 1858 and 1859 the first restoration campaigns were run by the Monuments historiques service to install the sub-prefecture and the town hall in the building, under Napoleon III.

The town still keeps a small cannon left from the castle's artillery, once fired in salute on great occasions, and from it Rochechouart takes the nickname Cité du canon. The piece is thought to date from the fifteenth century and to have been one of four the castle held at the beginning of the nineteenth; two of those went to make good the imperial artillery after the retreat from Russia, and of the two that remained, one burst while firing salutes during the nineteenth century. The last was given a modern carriage in 1870, for the French victories then expected, and is no longer fired because it has grown fragile. Between the wars the courtyard held a German 77, given by the French government in recognition of the sacrifice of the men of Rochechouart who died in the war of 1914 to 1918.

The Société des Amis des sciences et des arts de Rochechouart, founded in March 1889 at the instigation of Albert Masfrand, began digging at the site of Cassinomagus that same year and mounted an exhibition of anthropology and ethnography in the castle in 1890 that drew 4,500 visitors in a month; a permanent museum opened on 1 July 1894 in four rooms of the north wing, and in 1900 a selection of its objects went to the Exposition universelle in Paris. That museum closed when the contemporary art museum of the Haute-Vienne was inaugurated in the castle by the general council in 1985, and its collections, moved in 1991, reached the archaeological base at Chassenon in 2011. The sub-prefecture remained in the castle until 2008, when the district was paired with that of Bellac and a single sub-prefect took charge of both arrondissements from Bellac; the restoration of a sub-prefect at Rochechouart in 2025 did not bring the sub-prefecture back. The castle has been classified as a monument historique since 1840, and since 2015 its façades have been under major restoration.