THE ESTATE'S HISTORY
Situated in the Haute-Marche between the Auvergne and the Limousin areas, on the Millevaches plateau, 15 km south of Aubusson, the Domaine de Banizette is a very ancient rural seigniory which, as early as in the 15th century was already well organised, being the centre of the fief and its justice, as is shown by a judgement in 1474 given on site by the lord of the manor, Guillaume Coutellier, Batchelor of Law, in the presence of their Lordships Gabriel and Anthoine de Ribieires.
Three years later, it was Jean Anthoine de Bonneval, equerry, Lord of Montvert, who was the Lord of Banizette. Married to Catherine Gabrielle de Lestrange, they had no children. He left all his goods and chattels to a nephew and his wife, Guy de Lestrange, shortly after his marriage to Catherine de la Roche in 1516. Guy de Lestrange, Knight, Lord of Durat and Mareuges, who thus also became Lord of Montvert, Magnac and Banizette was a Gentleman first to the House of Louis XII, then to that of François I
At the begining of the17th century, a Royal Notary, Leonard Rousseau, Lord of the Age,had the title of the Seigniory, which he left to his daughter Jeanne, wife of Pierre de Miomandre de Laubard, equerry to King Louis XIII from whom he received his letters of nobility in 1638 and in whose service he was still when he died. For over a century this family left its mark on Banizette.
The four sons of the last Miomandre, Lord of Banizette, Joseph de Miomandre d'Espies who became Marquis of Châteauneuf La Forêt through his marriage, were members of the Squadron of the body guards to King Louis XVI. One of them saved Queen Marie-Antoinette on the night of the riots, the night of 5th to 6th October 1789, at the Chateau of Versailles, where he was very seriously wounded. In gratitude, Louis XVI made him a Knight of the Order of Saint Louis and personally bestowed upon him the Cross of the Order.
Driven out by the Revolution, the survivors of this branch of the Miomandre family emigrated to Belgium, where their descendants still live.
In 1776 Joseph Tixier-Dubreuil, a bourgeois from Felletin, a market town near Banizette, bought the seigniory thus saving the Estate from the Revolution.
After having changed hands several times during the 19th century, Banizette was bought by Victor Barbin, a lawyer at the Bar in Paris, in 1901 who retired there. The estate has remained in the same family for nearly a century.
|