Château d'Ouge

The Château d’Ouge stands in Ouge, France, erected beginning in 1553 by members of the regional nobility. Construction began under Jehan de Thon and the estate remained with the Thon family, a household of ancient knighthood from the Barrois, for more than one hundred thirty years. A 1665 land register records the building as a seigneurial residence. During the 1600s the house was enlarged to the south by a pavilion that contained a multi-purpose room called a “poile”, and to the west by a wing that held a chamber with an oven; nineteenth-century works later removed those seventeenth-century additions. The château escaped destruction when the village burned in 1636.

At the end of the seventeenth century Pierre de Thon owned the property; he died before 1685 and the lordship passed into other hands. Charles de Champagne acquired the seigneurie and in 1697 sold it to Louis Madroux, who immediately transferred it to Jean-Étienne de Montessus. The Montessus family held the estate through the eighteenth and into the early nineteenth century, while the Régent family occupied the house between 1705 and 1729. Montessus ownership lasted until about 1830.

In the nineteenth century ownership changed several times. In 1833 Patrice de Montessus sold inherited holdings to Charles-Auguste Leroy de Lisa. Five years later, in 1838, Jean-Baptiste and Jeanne-Marie Sol purchased the château and carried out repairs to the roof and to openings, financing those works with a loan. The Sols sold the property in 1849 to Pierre-Nicolas Dupuis and his wife Thérèse-Angélique Paulmard; the couple rebuilt the farm buildings, and the château then remained in the Paulmard family for four generations. Military forces occupied the house on several occasions during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: Russian officers in 1814, Austrian officers in 1815, Prussian troops in 1870, and German forces from 1940 until 1943.

Since 1980 the property has belonged to Bernard Bajolet, who served as a French ambassador and was director of the French external intelligence service from 2013 to 2017. The principal elements of the dwelling received legal protection as a historic monument on 30 June 1989, that measure covering the two main towers and the east façade between them, together with the west staircase tower and its spiral stair. A later order of 5 May 2021 extended protection to the château’s entire façades and roofs.