Château de Richelieu

Château de Richelieu
Reconstruction of the garden façade
General information
Status	Razed 1805
Location	Richelieu, Indre-et-Loire, France
Coordinates	47°00′26″N 0°19′33″E / 47.0071°N 0.3259°E / 47.0071; 0.3259Coordinates: 47°00′26″N 0°19′33″E / 47.0071°N 0.3259°E / 47.0071; 0.3259
Construction started	1631
Completed	1642
Owner	Cardinal Richelieu
Design and construction
Architect	Jacques Lemercier

The Château de Richelieu was an enormous 17th century chateau (castle, or manor house) built by the French clergyman, nobleman, and statesman Cardinal Richelieu (1585–1642) in Touraine. It was demolished for building materials in 1805 and almost nothing of it remains today. It lay south of Chinon and west of Sainte-Maure de Touraine, just south of what is now Richelieu, Indre-et-Loire, surrounded by mostly agricultural land.

Built between 1631 and 1642 on the site of the former du Plessis family mansion, the Château was at the heart of a several-hectare park located south of the current city. The site was designated a historical monument in September 1930.

The Château, along with a new model village ( "new town"), was built at the order of Richelieu, who had spent his youth there and bought the village of his ancestors; he had the estate raised to a duché-pairie in August 1631. He engaged the architect Jacques Lemercier, who had designed the Sorbonne and the Cardinal's hôtel in Paris, the Palais Cardinal (now the Palais-Royal). With the permission of King Louis XIII, Richelieu created from scratch a walled town on a grid arrangement, and, enclosing within its precincts the modest home of his childhood, an adjacent palace (the Château de Richelieu proper) surrounded by an ornamental moat and large imposing walls enclosing a series of entrance courts towards the town and, on the opposite side, grand axially-planned formal vista gardens of parterres and gravel walks, a central circular fountain, and views reaching to an exedra cut in the surrounding trees and pierced by an avenue in the woodlands extending to the horizon. The pleasure grounds were enclosed in woodland; since their innovative example was followed and extended at Vaux-le-Vicomte and in the gardens of Versailles, and since André Le Nôtre's father was employed at Richelieu in 1629, it is not improbable that the young boy was employed as well. Construction took place between 1631 and 1642 – the year of the Cardinal's death – and employed around 2,000 workers.