Château de Montgobert

The Château de Montgobert in the midst of the Forest of Retz, near Soissons, in Montgobert, Aisne, Picardy, is a neoclassical French château that was built for Antoine Pierre Desplasses between 1768 and 1775 on the site of an ancient seigneurie.

[1] The château, which has the air of an English Palladian house, with four Ionic columns under an arced pediment, raised upon a high rusticated basement, was owned by Pauline Bonaparte, Napoleon's sister and wife of General Charles Leclerc who employed Pierre-François-Léonard Fontaine to raise the house by adding an attic storey[2] about 1798 and transformed the parterre into a terrace overlooking the park, which was re-landscaped in the naturalistic fashion, à l'anglaise, with meadows and clumps of trees and specimens against a background of woodland.

He died in Saint Domingue, present-day Haiti in November 1802; his ashes were returned to Montgobert and a tomb in the park was designed by Fontaine and executed by a certain Laudier,[3] but never finished.

The château passed by inheritance to maréchal Davout, then to the Cambacérès and Suchet d'Albuféra families.

Today the chateau belongs to the Cambacérès and Suchet d'Albuféra families.