Château de Chassenon

The Château de Chassenon is a historic château located in the commune of Xanton-Chassenon, in the Vendée department of the Pays de la Loire region in western France (in the canton of Fontenay-le-Comte).

The first known lord of Chassenon was Thibaud Chabot, who acquired the estate around 1220 through his marriage to Aënor de Brosse. The property later passed by inheritance to the Volvire family and subsequent owners. The present château was built in the 1780s by Antoine Anthisme Walsh, seigneur de Chassenon, near an older building that still stands. After the French Revolution the estate was sold in 1807 to Jean-Joachim Möller, a wealthy merchant and banker of Norwegian origin who had been Danish consul in Nantes. It remained in the Möller family and later passed to the Querqui and Sioc’han de Kersabiec families. In recent years it has been owned by Roderic and Elisabeth van Praet d’Amerloo.

The most remarkable feature of the domain is the Renaissance fountain (Fontaine de la Fosse) standing in the park. Originally commissioned around 1550 by Jacques Le Venier and sculpted by Léonard de la Réau at La Fosse (Mouilleron-en-Pareds), it was moved to the Chassenon park in the mid-19th century by the Möller family and restored under the guidance of Octave de Rochebrune. The 6.5-metre-high fountain, with its two levels of antique-inspired decoration, scaled dome and later lantern, is a major example of mid-16th-century Renaissance sculpture in Bas-Poitou. It was classified as a Monument historique in 1956. After collapsing under a fallen cedar in December 1999, it was carefully reconstructed by anastylosis (reusing more than 60 % of the original stones) in a recent restoration project.

The château and its park form a private property of historical and architectural interest in southern Vendée.