Le Château de Vaux, vainqueur du grand Trophée 2025 Dassault Histoire et Patrimoine

Welcome to the Château de Vaud in Champagne, a large 18th century residence on the outskirts of Bourgogne, which I had the immense privilege of buying 10 years ago and which we open to the public every day to show the progress of this great project that I wish to share with you today. At the beginning of the project, Vaud was a large abandoned castle since the 1930s. It had to be opened to the public, to make it known to the people of the region, who were our first ambassadors, and also to open a complex of reception rooms and gypsies in the communes that hosted a centre for disabled young women. These communes had been very well restored and allowed me, from the very first months, to create enough economic activity to pay the loans and self-finance the project as a whole. A few years later, I launched the important site where the facades, the roofs and the whole of the castle are covered. Each year, we have the very ambitious program to restore one room of the ground floor. These are large reception rooms that had been looted and are therefore in very poor condition. Now that all the buildings that supported these levels have disappeared, we are gradually restoring these woodsheds and all these interior decorations that have disappeared. It is thanks to the money of the visitors and our 20,000 entries per year that we can save, in parallel with the castle, all these interiors and these decorations that we are trying to bring back to the taste of the past, on horseback, between the 18th and the 19th century. And from next year, when we have finished the ground floor rooms, we will be able to tackle the heavy task of the work on the first floor and the second floor, where there is also a lot of work to do, the ceilings and all these decorations to reconstruct. By buying this castle in 2015, I was also able to realize a childhood dream, which was to save a large sleeping castle in the middle of a forest. This forest setting particularly touched me, and I thank all the people who supported me in the difficult moments, in the organization of the events and in the daily life of this great project. The team of the castle is also a fabric of neighbors, friends and volunteers who allowed me to believe in this dream. I thank very warmly the Dassault Foundation and the Merimée Foundation for the Grand History and Heritage Trophy and for their work, carried out for 15 years for French historical monuments. Thank you.