Couvent des Augustins

The Couvent des Augustins is a former Augustinian convent located on Rue de la Chapelle in the bastide town of Domme, in the Dordogne department of the Nouvelle-Aquitaine region in southwestern France.

It was founded at the beginning of the 14th century on the initiative of King Philip IV the Fair (Philippe le Bel). The convent was established under the direction of Cardinal Gilles de Rome (Aegidius Romanus), preceptor of the king and General of the Order of Saint Augustine around 1292, and enjoyed royal protection as a royal foundation.

In 1411 an inquiry attempted to reform internal abuses, but with limited success. By the 16th century the community had dwindled to one prior, two monks and two servants; its poverty was officially recorded in 1533 during an inquiry in Sarlat that confirmed its tax exemption as a royal foundation.

During the Wars of Religion the convent suffered heavily: in 1588 the Protestant captain Geoffroy de Vivans took Domme by surprise and destroyed part of the complex, including the church, leaving only the bell tower standing. The Augustinians were expelled and returned only in 1617, after the town had been restored to royalist control in 1592. They then restored the buildings and established a school teaching the basics of Latin, writing and arithmetic.

At the French Revolution the community left the convent in 1790 in accordance with the decrees suppressing religious orders. The buildings and dependencies were sold as national property in 1791 to a local bourgeois named Bar and became private property. Part of the former convent was later remodelled as a chartreuse (a central three-bay body with a broken roof flanked by single-storey wings). The property later belonged to Count Colonna Walewski, a descendant of Napoleon I.

The remaining chapel, which retains Gothic elements (sculpted corbels, decorated ogee arches) together with traces of later reconstructions, was inscribed as a Monument historique on 19 February 1971. The site is private property.