Château de la Brède

Château de la Brède, France, was built in the 1306, on the remains of a previous fortification: it was built in the Gothic style, surrounded by a moat filled with water and equipped with a defensive system.

Charles-Louis de Secondat, baron of Montesquieu, was born inside the castle on January 18, 1698 and lived there, who wrote a series of works including The Spirit of the Laws. He also made some changes to the structure without alternating the defensive aspect: he created a French garden and an English one and surrounded the fortress of Bordeaux vineyards.

It belonged to the Montesquieu family until 2004, when the countess Jacqueline de Chabannes, her last descendant, died: she left the castle as an inheritance to the private foundation that bears her name, namely Fondation Jacqueline de Chabannes.

The building has a polygonal plan, with a larger tower on one of the sides; it is accessed through three bridges that have replaced the old drawbridges. In the castle the room of the Baron of Montesquieu is preserved as it appeared in the eighteenth century and his library, although the books contained in it were transferred to the municipal library of Bordeaux in 1994, while another part of the works had already been sold in 1924 and others in 1939, mainly manuscripts, at the Hôtel Drouot.

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