Château des Milandes

Château des Milandes was built around 1489 by François de Caumont and was until 1535 the main house of the lords of Caumont, who preferred it to their large, uncomfortable medieval castle of Castelnaud. Caumont remodelled the building for his wife, who wanted somewhere less austere and full of light: mullioned windows fitted with stained glass were cut into the walls, though the medieval turrets, spiral staircases and gargoyles were kept. Jacques Nompar de Caumont, who served King Henri IV, stayed at the château many times.

The French Revolution left the château abandoned, and it was sold in the nineteenth century. After a fire caused by lack of upkeep, Charles-Auguste Delbret-Claverie, an industrialist who had made his fortune in orthopaedic corsets and employed 500 workers, bought it in 1900 and began restoring it. Under Henri Lafillée, chief architect of the Monuments historiques, new neo-Gothic and neo-Renaissance towers, living ranges, balconies and balustrades with allegorical sculpture were added, and a formal French garden was laid out in 1908 by Jules Vacherot.

A chapel built in 1503, which became a Protestant temple after the lords converted, was excluded from the estate through a land-registry error and classified by the tax administration as ownerless property; it did not rejoin the château, of which it had been a dependency since its construction, until 2018–2019. Listed as a monument historique on 9 June 1926, the chapel was found to have a crypt beneath it and sixteenth-century frescoes, among them a Saint Christopher four metres high.

Josephine Baker discovered the château after meeting its owner, the ship's doctor of the ocean liner Normandie, during a Le Havre to New York crossing in 1935. Already renting the property, she moved there after the German invasion of Paris in 1941 and used it as a centre for resistance activity. She bought the château in 1947 with her new husband, Jo Bouillon, whom she married in its chapel that year.

Running water, electricity and central heating were installed in these years; Baker added a mosaic floor and a black-and-gold bathroom modelled on the bottle of the Arpège perfume, and kept exotic animals in the grounds. She developed a tourist complex she called the "Village du Monde" — hotel, bar-restaurant with a stage, waxworks museum, minigolf, tennis courts and swimming pool — and raised twelve adopted children of nine nationalities there, a family she called her "rainbow tribe", who featured in photo reports in Paris Match and Jours de France.

Nagging financial trouble — falling visitor numbers, heavy spending and bills inflated by local tradesmen — had the family 85 million old francs in debt as early as 1957, and in 1964 the auction of the château was announced. An appeal to the French by the actress Brigitte Bardot, a committee formed around the writer François Mauriac, and financial help from King Hassan II of Morocco, Cuban leader Fidel Castro and Ivorian president Félix Houphouët-Boigny won a temporary reprieve. Baker turned down an apparently advantageous offer from Gilbert Trigano, who wanted to run the tourist complex and leave her the use of the château, and it was sold for a tenth of its value in 1968.

Invoking French law, Baker won the right to remain until 15 March 1969, but while she was away on tour the new owner moved in. She barricaded herself alone in the kitchen; when she stepped out for water his workers locked the door behind her, and she spent the night on the front steps before being taken to hospital the next day. The episode turned in her favour and she won a court order allowing her back into the kitchen, but she and her children ultimately left for Paris and then Monaco.

Four families owned the château in succession after Baker left. Its terraces, façades and roofs were listed as a monument historique on 29 August 1986; the château, its wine store, its formal garden and its former stables were listed in their entirety on 7 December 2009. Henry and Claude de Labarre bought the property in 2001 and began its restoration, and it has housed an exhibition on Josephine Baker since that year; management passed to their daughter, Angélique de Saint-Exupéry, in 2006. In 2013 it received the Maisons des Illustres label, the third site in the Dordogne to do so.