Château du Bellay

Château du Bellay stands in the commune of Allonnes, France.

The estate served as the point of origin for the du Bellay family, a lineage that provided bishops to Paris, Poitiers, Le Mans and Fréjus, along with abbés and other clerics. The poet Joachim du Bellay did not inherit this property; he belonged to a junior branch of the family that held the nearby estates of Liré and La Turmelière.

Ownership of the château moved through a series of hands over the centuries before it entered the 19th-century holdings of the Feuillant family. Members of that family were prominent industrialists, and one held a managerial post with the General Omnibus Company of Paris, an organisation later connected to what became the RATP. By marital alliance the estate passed to the de Contades family, who are descendants of Marshal Louis-Georges-Erasme de Contades, and the present owners are descendants of that line.

During the Second World War German forces requisitioned the château. General Kurt Feldt used the house during the Defence of the Loire because of its strategic situation near Saumur. In that episode German movements in the area were halted by the Cadets of Saumur.

The state formally recognised the château’s heritage value when it received historic-monument status on 8 November 1995.