Château d'Arnouville

The Château d’Arnouville stands in the commune of Arnouville, France; it was built in the mid-eighteenth century for the French minister Jean-Baptiste de Machault d’Arnouville.

Planning and building took place in the 1750s. Work began around 1750 and continued until 1757, with other accounts giving 1751 to 1757. Pierre Contant d’Ivry prepared plans and oversaw the works while Jean-Michel Chevotet carried them forward. Machault, who served as controller-general of finances from 1745, keeper of the seals in 1750, and minister of the navy in 1754, inherited a small square pavilion at Arnouville in 1750 and embarked on a large new château. Hydraulic engineers Antoine Deparcieux and an associate named Laurent constructed a pumping machine to lift the waters of the Croult into the garden system.

Building stopped when Machault fell from office in the late 1750s (construction is recorded as being halted about 1757, possibly 1760). Only the long eastern wing of the planned U-shaped main block and the chapel were completed; the wider ensemble of three main bodies remained unbuilt. Machault continued to occupy the incomplete residence as well as a Parisian hôtel. He moved to his son’s château at Thoiry in 1789. During the Revolution the property’s goods were seized and official seals applied in 1794; Machault died in prison the same year while awaiting trial.

The estate passed to his children. Two elder sons returned to live at Arnouville from 1802 and died there in 1820 and 1827; the younger son Charles lived chiefly at Thoiry. In July 1815 Louis XVIII stayed at the château for a few days, an event mentioned by Chateaubriand. Ownership changed in the nineteenth century by inheritance and sale; the comte de Choiseul d’Aillecourt acquired the property in 1868, and in 1872 it was bought by Baroness Nathaniel de Rothschild. In 1873 she removed eighteenth-century ironwork, including parts of the main staircase railing and the monumental entrance grille originally made by the locksmith Nesle, and had them reinstalled at the abbey of Vaux‑de‑Cernay. The baroness began reselling parcels from 1874, and the estate passed through roughly twenty owners into the 1920s, among them Léo Nardus. The stables were demolished during the nineteenth century.

In 1921 Mme Hérold purchased the domaine and established an institution for soldiers suffering nervous wounds from the recent war. The site later became a horticultural apprenticeship centre run by the Association des Blessés Nerveux de la Guerre and then belonged to Entraide universitaire, continuing horticultural training for children with mental disabilities. It today houses the Institut thérapeutique, éducatif et pédagogique Pierre Male, which trains adolescents in horticulture. Land once belonging to the château was used until 1922 for the large La Muette development at Garges-lès-Gonesse. The façades and roofs of the château and orangery, the chapel in its entirety, the principal staircase with its enclosure, two ground-floor wood‑panelled salons and the historic footprint of the park were officially listed as protected historic monuments on 17 October 2000.