Abbaye de Corbigny

This abbey, of which Armand de Bourbon, Prince de Conti, brother of the Grand Condé and short-lived patron of Molière's troupe, was one of the abbots, is a heritage site with a long history that its architecture both magnifies and "crushes". Simplicity, regularity but also monumentality are the words that best describe an architecture that expresses, at first glance, the taste for stone and earth of those who commissioned it, even if a more attentive reading of the monument reveals, here and there, within its envelope, solids and unliquidations and some fantasies in the decorations. This choice of massive occupation of the ground space, this fortress effect, constitutes a paradox in the original conception of a monument which was above all intended for prayer and verticality..

Behind the mineral facades, the former common rooms, cells, staircases and galleries form the spaces of a monument that has remained relatively "as it was", despite the architectural adaptations "imposed" by its different uses, over the years and regimes, from the making available to the Nation of the Clergy's property by the Constituent Assembly in 1789 to the establishment of a college with boarding facilities at the beginning of the fifties..