Château de Saint-Fargeau

Saint-Fargeau began in 980 as a fortified hunting residence built by Héribert, bishop of Auxerre and a natural son of Hugh the Great, brother of Hugues Capet. Its first known lord, around 1060, was Ithier, lord of Toucy. The residence withstood a siege in 1411; the lands then passed to Louis de Bar, bishop of Verdun and cardinal, who bequeathed them in 1430 to his nephew Jean-Jacques, Marquis of Montferrat. On 11 February 1450 the marquis's sons Jean, Guillaume and Boniface sold "the lands and châtellenies of Saint-Fargeau" to Jacques Cœur, grand financier to the French crown. Cœur fell from royal favour under Charles VII in 1451 and was stripped of his estates, including Saint-Fargeau, by judgment in May 1453.

Antoine de Chabannes, Count of Dammartin and Grand Master of France, bought the forfeited estate for 20,000 gold crowns and rebuilt the château on the foundations of the old residence after 1453. When Louis XI came to the throne in 1461 he took revenge on Chabannes for having forced him, as dauphin, to flee Dauphiné during his revolt against his own father — restoring Saint-Fargeau to the Cœur family and having Chabannes imprisoned. Chabannes escaped, joined the League of the Public Weal, and retook the château by force before being restored to his estates and honours. In 1467 he began the great tower, intended as a refuge until the full reconstruction was finished; it later became the keep.

To keep Saint-Fargeau in the family, his son Jean de Chabannes paid Jacques Cœur's widow 10,000 gold crowns and an annual rent of 400 livres. The estate descended through the Chabannes line for several generations; under Nicolas d'Anjou-Mézières the fief was raised to a countship in 1542.

Anne-Marie-Louise d'Orléans, Duchess of Montpensier — Louis XIV's first cousin, known at court as "la Grande Mademoiselle" — was exiled to Saint-Fargeau in 1652 for backing the Fronde against the crown. The château's irregular pentagon of curtain walls and six pink-brick towers, five topped with lanterns, dated mainly from Chabannes's building campaign of 1467–1488; the oldest and largest, the Moulin or Jacques Cœur tower, had been built leaning inward so that rainwater was channelled into storage vessels inside the walls. During her exile the duchess commissioned the king's architect François Le Vau, later one of the architects of Versailles, to rework the château's four internal courtyard facades in a classical style of brick and stone between 1653 and 1657.

A fire in 1752 destroyed the interior of two buildings adjoining the chapel — including the old apartments used by the Grande Mademoiselle and what had been the largest guards' room in France — though the exterior walls survived and the Le Peletier family, who owned the château by then, restored it. Louis-Michel Le Peletier de Saint-Fargeau, who inherited the estate in 1778, sat in the Revolutionary Convention and voted for the death of Louis XVI; he was assassinated in a Paris restaurant by a former royal bodyguard on 20 January 1793, the eve of the king's execution. Jacques-Louis David's painting of the murder scene was bought back from the artist's heirs by Le Peletier's daughter after the Restoration and, by family tradition, hidden somewhere within the château's walls; it has never been found.

First listed as a monument historique in 1925 and fully classified in 1949 — covering its facades, courtyard, roofs, moat and park — the château was bought and restored by brothers Michel and Jacques Guyot in the late 1970s. It remains open to the public, with the association Les Amis du Château de Saint-Fargeau staging an annual sound-and-light show to fund further restoration.