Château de Lugny

Château de Lugny stands in the commune of Lugny, France; it was raised in the medieval period by the local seigneurial household, initially the house of Lugny.

From the medieval era the site formed a fortified seigneurial complex at the foot of the castle hill west of the village. The stronghold was protected by several towers and a high square keep, and its defensive ditches were supplied with water from the Bourbonne spring, known locally as the Blue Waters. The house of Lugny held the lordship until the middle of the 16th century.

The estate passed by marriage in 1558 to the Chabot family and in 1579 to the de Saulx family. In 1647 the lordship was transferred to the La Baume family of Montrevel, and descendants of that house remained lords until the end of the Ancien Régime. Florent‑Alexandre‑Melchior de La Baume, born in 1736, was the last entitled lord; he was executed in 1794.

On the night of 27–28 July 1789, during the episode known as the Great Fear, the principal seigneurial residence, the castle chapel and the great keep were pillaged and set on fire. Contemporary testimony records that the buildings were burned so thoroughly that little of their superstructure survived above ground.

After the Revolution the structures that had endured the conflagration lost their agricultural role and were adapted for industrial use in the first half of the 19th century, first for cotton spinning and then by about 1838 for a factory producing colored tiles, which employed roughly thirty workers. Later the surviving buildings served administrative and ecclesiastical functions, housing the local gendarmerie and, from around 1910 until the mid‑1980s, the presbytery.

Between the world wars part of the ruined castle belonged to Dr Paul Jacques. In the autumn of 1943 a small German garrison was stationed at the château; the château itself served as the command post while troops were quartered elsewhere in the village. In 1946 Abbé Joseph Robert (1898–1987) bought the property and converted it that same year into a private boarding school. Since then the site has been partly occupied by the private school group called La Source.

Almost all of the surviving buildings are owned by the association Les Foyers communautaires, founded in December 1946, which established its headquarters in the main house. Conservation work in late 2020 repaired the long façade facing the park, restored one of the 14th‑century round towers (during which several cannon‑ports were exposed and cleared) and addressed the north façade. A local explanatory panel was installed in 2022. The château took part in the European Heritage Days for the first time in 2021 and again in 2024. Periodic collapses of the ground on the castle platform have revealed buried masonry, and an opening in 2018 exposed a small vaulted chamber below the surface. The site remains private property and is opened for occasional events.