Saint-Robert is officially one of France's "Most Beautiful Villages" - Deep Heart of France (2024)

It’s easy enough, when you’re bouncing around the deep heart of France, to experience this remarkable country in fragments, to imagine each castle and medieval abbey and little village existing in deep isolation, each tucked in its own private corner and invisible to the rest of the world. It’s easy to experience the country as Graham Robb describes it in The Discovery of France (one of my all-time favorite history books):

It’s easy to imagine this world of isolation and disconnection – but in some ways, I think, that would be wrong! One of the most amazing things I’ve discovered in my travels through central France is just how connected the medieval world could be. Today, we visit a place that owes much of its existence to its connection to a sprawling network that spread across the country in the Middle Ages: Saint-Robert, in the département of Corrèze.

Saint-Robert is a "Most Beautiful Village of France"

First things first, though. Today, Saint-Robert is officially one of the “Most Beautiful Villages in France”. There are several others in this immediate area:

As you’d expect in a “most beautiful village”, Saint-Robert is visually charming. Several of the houses have brilliant floral displays, many of them are like “mini-chateaux” in design, and the whole town looks out across a broad green valley. It doesn’t take long before I discover the first of the two “required” historical monuments that make this a “plus beau village” – the Château de Verneuil. It’s a big block of a building, for me, more a “big house” than a “chateau”, built in 1472 for the Verneuil family. The house is privately owned, so you can’t tour inside, but it makes an impressive introduction to this little town.

Part of a grand medieval "network"

More interesting to me, though, is the fine little Romanesque church – the second of the “required” historical monuments, and a gateway into a story of how “connected” the medieval world could be. Saint-Robert was already mentioned in history as “connected”, even back in the time of Charlemagne, since it was a way station on the network of pilgrimage routes that lead to Santiago-de-Compostela.

But it’s the Benedictine abbey founded here in 1122 C.E. that gives Saint-Robert its name and its connection to one of the great medieval reseaux you encounter so frequently in travels around France. It’s named for the massive “mother ship” at La Chaise Dieu, where an abbey the size of an aircraft hangar is named for its founder: Robert de Turland. It’s hard to estimate the impact La Chaise Dieu had on medieval France – I’ve encountered other “satellite” houses in places as diverse as Lavaudieu (also a “most beautiful village”) and Brantome (where a classical facade hides a surprising secret behind its walls). We know for sure that Saint Robert de Turland had a profound influence on the monk who started his career at La Chaise Dieu and eventually became Pope Clement VI, one of the Avignon Popes who ruled as the Black Death swept across Europe.

It’s a classic design, supposedly inspired by the larger church at Beaulieu-sur-Dordogne. All the things I love about Romanesque architecture – the carvings at the top of each column, the simplicity of the design, the regular rounded arches – are present here, as well as a 13^th-century Spanish statue of Christ. I sat by myself (no other tourists in sight) for 20 minutes drinking in the light filtering through the thick walls and the simple stained-glass windows and tried to imagine congregants coming here every Sunday for almost a thousand years no matter what turbulence disturbed the life of this quiet little village.

And there was plenty of turbulence. After Saint-Robert’s 12^th-century “glory days”, the Correze, the Dordogne – this whole part of France – were the sites of many bloody battles during the Hundred Years War (1337 – 1453 C.E.) and the Wars of Religion that ravaged the country in the last third of the 16^th century. Surprisingly, there aren’t any particular monuments in Saint-Robert to either conflict – in fact, the almost 200 years of these 2 wars are not even mentioned on the town’s “welcome” sign – but you can imagine the effect the battles would have had on a little village like this. It’s not close enough to a real fortress-style castle to afford people here much protection from marauding armies, and the only real clue to those violent years is in the massive square tower at the chapel end of the church – it has cross-shaped slits in its thick walls to accommodate archers defending the town.

Signs inside the church do mention that the abbey here started to decline beginning in the 14^th century (when only 6 monks remained onsite), and since then the village of Saint-Robert has had few brushes with the mainstreams of French history. One famous citizen – Pierre-Simeon Bourzat – is celebrated for being a “lawyer [avocat] for the poor” and for being exiled to Belgium with his friend Victor Hugo after he opposed the rise of Napoleon III in 1851. (He and Hugo apparently had the idea 100 years before the European Union to create a “United States of Europe”; clearly, their plan went nowhere.)

The town was also used in the 1980s as the setting for a 6-episode French miniseries, Des Grives Aux Loups, based on a book by Claude Michelet. It’s one of those sprawling multi-generational sagas about life in a small French village between 1899 and 1998, and the TV version of the town was called “Saint Liberal sur Diamond.”

Leaving Saint-Robert