How this archive is made — Le Roi du Château

Where every value on a record comes from, what we compose ourselves, and what we refuse to say.

Five kinds of statement

Everything on a record belongs to one of five categories, and each is marked where it appears.

Official source. The base Mérimée of the French Ministry of Culture, and the official website of a château where one exists. Reference number and link are on every record.

Public database. Wikidata for coordinates, dates and labels; Wikimedia Commons for images. Each image carries its photographer and its licence.

Supplied by the owner or manager. Reaches us through a claim. What we check is the identity of the person who wrote to us, against the email domain of the château's own website. We do not check the building, its opening hours, or whether the statement is correct — and the record says so.

Editorial. The Journal and the Glossary. Written by us, about how buildings of this kind work in general — never about a particular property.

Composed. The opening sentence of every record is assembled from the fields of that record: place, century, protection. It is not written, and it is not drawn from any source beyond the ones named.

What we do not do

We do not rate, rank, score or grade a building. We do not describe its condition. We do not value it, estimate what restoring it would cost, or say whether it is a good purchase. We carry no reviews.

That is not modesty. A judgement about someone else's building, published by a party that has not seen it, is both unreliable and a liability we have no reason to accept.

The register changes, and we record that

The base Mérimée is not a finished document. Protections are added, buildings move from inscrit to classé, notices disappear. Each monthly synchronisation compares what the register says today with what it said before, and the differences are published in Le Registre. That comparison is about the notice, not about the building: a protection granted in 2026 may concern work carried out decades earlier.

When we are wrong

We repair and we say so. Twenty-one records in this archive carried names mangled by a double CSV encoding; they were repaired in August 2026 and the correction is recorded in the project history. If you find another, tell us.