Château du Champ de Bataille

The château stands on the plain of the Campagne du Neubourg, between the rivers Risle and Iton, and scholars have never agreed on why the ground was called Champ de Bataille. The most commonly told legend places a great battle here in 935, between the forces of the count of the Cotentin and those of William Longsword commanded by Bernard the Dane — an ancestor of the Harcourt family — whose victory consolidated the unity of Normandy. Other explanations are more modest: a field once owned by a Monsieur Bataille, boar fights said to have taken place on the site, or the commemoration of a Harcourt victory over their rivals of Tancarville.

In the early 1650s Count Alexandre de Créquy-Bernieulles, a frondeur and friend of the Prince de Condé, was exiled from court by Cardinal Mazarin, who governed France during the minority of Louis XIV. Confined to the provinces, Créquy had inherited from his mother, Renée de Vieuxpont, a forest with a hunting lodge near Le Neubourg, and there he set out to build a palace that would recall the splendour of a royal court he would never see again. The work ran from 1653 to 1665; of the original château, the only documents to survive are two garden plans attributed, without certainty, to André Le Nôtre. Créquy, who never obtained a post at court, died in debt in Paris on 5 August 1702 and was buried in the church of Sainte-Opportune-du-Bosc.

The château passed to Créquy's nephew, Gabriel René, Marquis de Mailloc, together with the debts, and on his childless death in 1724 to his widow, Claude Lydie d'Harcourt, daughter of the first Duc d'Harcourt. Her heirs sold the estate in 1753, but in May 1754 Anne-François d'Harcourt, Marquis de Beuvron and nephew of the marquise, exercised the family's right of lineal repurchase and bought it back for 473,500 livres. He was 27, and the house was dilapidated. He made it his principal residence, swept away the seventeenth-century interiors, built the present main staircase, vestibule and chapel, fitted a theatre into the outbuildings, and in 1765 bought the neighbouring barony of Le Neubourg, of which the Champ-de-Bataille lordship had originally been a fragment.

The Revolution stopped his works unfinished. Duc de Beuvron from 1784, he did not emigrate but withdrew to Amiens, where he felt safer; the empty, sequestrated château was pillaged in 1795, and after his death at Amiens in 1797 his heirs sold it, with 1,400 hectares of land, in 1802.

The nineteenth century brought six owners. From 1840 the Elbeuf businessman Antoine Prieur, a speculator, sold the domain off parcel by parcel; the prefect Joseph Michon followed in 1877 and, in the century's last years, the Briton William Consett. In 1903 Count Charles d'Harcourt, a descendant of the Duc de Beuvron, bought the château back, restored it and lived in it, but sold in 1936 to the town of Le Neubourg, which ran it as a hospice; after the Second World War it served as a prison camp, then a women's prison.

In 1947 François-Charles, 11th Duc d'Harcourt, bought the château from the town. He restored the façades, roofs and timbers, replanted a park of 110 hectares of woodland, and refurnished the rooms with family pieces from the château of Thury-Harcourt, burnt by the German occupiers in 1944. He opened Champ-de-Bataille to visitors in 1957, and in July 1966 some 120 members of the French and English branches of the family gathered there to celebrate the Harcourt millennium. Unable to pass the house on within his family, he sold it in 1982.

After a decade under Gilles Boutrolle d'Estaimbuc, who laid out a golf course in part of the park in 1990, the château was bought in 1992 by the interior designer Jacques Garcia. Beyond the great staircase, only the upper vestibule, the salon de compagnie and the chapel had escaped the destructions of successive owners, and Garcia set about restoring the interior to a state it might have had under the Ancien Régime. The vanished formal gardens were recreated from a surviving sketch: more than a million cubic metres of earth were moved to restore the seventeenth-century levels along a perspective of 1.5 kilometres, and after a storm felled much of the old timber in 1993, some 60,000 box plants, 10,000 hornbeams and 35,000 yews were planted. The château has been protected as a monument historique since 1952, and its gardens are listed among the Notable Gardens of France.