Montjeu

 Château de Montjeu

    Recent political history links a very private Burgundian château with Britain. Sir James Goldsmith (1933-97) was the son of a British former Conservative MP, but his mother was Burgundian, and so it was no surprise that Sir James chose to buy a château in Burgundy, Montjeu at Broye, near Autun (Saône-et-Loire), and to make it his main French home. Indeed, it was there that he spent most of his final illness.



    The château is situated within a very large wooded park, and remains private, but there are some old postcard photographs of it, as well as recent drone images. It was built in the early 17th century, and is known to have hosted both Mme de Sévigné and Voltaire (though not at the same time, for obvious reasons!). Having fallen into some disrepair, it was restored by its mid-20th century owner, Roger Demon, who also sheltered a Jewish family there during the Nazi Occupation, for which he was declared Righteous among the Nations after the war.





    According to Lady Annabel Goldsmith's memoirs, it was during a houseparty at the château that Sir James Goldsmith had the idea of founding the Referendum Party. He had already been elected an MEP in 1994 for the Mouvement pour la France - l'Autre Europe. This sovereignist group won 13% of the French euro elections vote, and Sir James could see that euroscepticism was an idea whose time had come: although the Referendum Party did not take off immediately in the UK, its followers quickly morphed into UKIP and went on to win the 2015 referendum (its successor Brexit Party becoming the largest party in the UK's final European Parliament election, in 2019), something which of course Sir James did not live to see. As much of Europe is now swinging towards the sovereignist view that borders and national/cultural identity need protection, it may be that Sir James was prescient in picking up on that incipient movement thirty years ago.










Popular posts from this blog

Reading Abbey

Image
  Another connection between Burgundy and England lies in the early history of the royal and Cluniac foundation of Reading Abbey. The abbey was founded by King Henry I, and the community started with a group of monks from Cluny (plus some from its daughter house at Lewes Priory), under Hugh of Amiens as the first abbot, in 1121. Abbot Hugh was then elected as Archbishop of Rouen in King Henry's Duchy of Normandy in 1129, and it was he who ministered to the King as he lay dying of "a surfeit of lampreys" in Normandy in 1135: the king's body was embalmed at Rouen and brought back to be buried at Reading Abbey. Archbishop Hugh spent a lot of his time in England, and was at the Council of Oxford in 1139, summoned by Henry of Blois, Bishop of Winchester and himself also a former monk of Cluny. When the great abbey church at Reading was finally completed, it was longer than Westminster Abbey and comparable in size and grandeur with Gloucester or Ely. Reading Abbey church wa...
Read more

Berzé-la-Ville

Image
  Berzé-la-Ville      La Chapelle des Moines, at Berzé-la-Ville (Saône-et-Loire), between Cluny and Mâcon, has a British connection which is rather recent.      The chapel was built by Hugues de Semur, the great Abbot of Cluny, as part of a monastic grange, in the 11th century. Raymond Oursel, in his Bourgogne Romane , speculates that it must have been one of Abbot Hugh's favourite places, as it is one of only three to be mentioned in his final testament, written at the end of his unusually long life (he was 84 when he died in 1109). It is famous for its frescoed apse, which was the product of the very best Cluniac artists:      Probably painted under Hugh's successor as Abbot, Ponce de Melgueil (1109-22), it shows Christ handing a no longer legible text to St Peter (who was the patron saint of the Abbey of Cluny), surrounded by the other apostles, and two smaller groups of saints with local connections below.      The cha...
Read more

House Chapel

Image
  This year, the new house chapel has come into use, so that the Daily Office can be read there, and Mass celebrated on Sunday and major feast day mornings. / Nous avons aménagé une partie des dépendences en chapelle cette année, afin que nous puissions y célébrer les offices et la messe. On Sunday evenings, we have Evensong from The Book of Common Prayer:
Read more