Josephine Baker’s Chateau des Milandes, Home to the French Resistance and Her Rainbow Family

High above the Dordogne River in southwestern France sits a Renaissance chateau with soaring towers, intricate gargoyles, and brilliant stained glass windows that catch the light like jewels. Chateau des Milandes looks like something out of a fairy tale, which is exactly what Josephine Baker thought when she first saw it in the 1930s. 

She called it her Sleeping Beauty castle. But the story that unfolded within its walls over the next three decades was far more dramatic than any fairy tale. The chateau became a secret Resistance headquarters during World War II, a haven for Jewish refugees, a weapons cache, and later a utopian experiment in racial harmony that attracted thousands of visitors from around the world.

Today, you can walk through the rooms where one of the most extraordinary women of the 20th century lived, loved, fought Nazis, and raised 12 adopted children from every corner of the globe. The chateau stands as a monument to ambition, courage, and the price of dreaming too big.

A Chateau Built for Love

Chateau des Milandes was built in 1489 by François de Caumont, Lord of Castelnaud, for his wife, Claude de Cardaillac. The name comes from mi landa, meaning among the moors, a reference to its idyllic countryside setting in the Dordogne Valley.

For centuries, it served as the residence of local lords who preferred its comfort to the cold, drafty medieval fortress of Chateau de Castelnaud just across the valley.

The architecture seamlessly blends medieval and Renaissance influences. Slate roofs top elegant towers decorated with finials and gargoyles. Large mullioned windows flood the interior with light.

The stained glass windows, brilliantly colored and meticulously designed, remain one of the chateau’s most captivating features. Inside, Renaissance fireplaces with intricate carvings stand alongside wood paneling and vaulted ceilings.

Like so many French estates, the chateau fell into disrepair after the Revolution. For decades, it languished until 1900, when Charles Auguste Claverie purchased it and began restoration. He enlisted Jules Vacherot, chief landscape architect for the City of Paris and creator of the Trocadero gardens, to redesign the estate’s gardens.

Vacherot created a French-style garden across several terraces, featuring fountains, boxwoods, lawns, and flowerbeds, transforming the grounds into a masterpiece.

The chateau was ready for its next chapter. It just needed the right person to write it.

Enter Josephine Baker

Josephine Baker first saw Chateau des Milandes in the 1930s and fell instantly in love. Born in grinding poverty in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1906, Baker had clawed her way from the slums to become the biggest star in Europe.

Her grandmother had been born into slavery. Her mother worked as a laundry worker. Baker herself had worked menial jobs from age eight and married at 13 to escape her situation.

Dancing became her ticket out. By 19, she was in Paris performing in La Revue Negre, wearing almost nothing but a skirt made of artificial bananas. The performance scandalized and captivated Paris.

She became the toast of Europe practically overnight. Pablo Picasso and Ernest Hemingway came to see her perform. She walked the streets with a pet cheetah on a diamond-studded leash.

France gave her the freedom America never had. She became a French citizen in 1937 after marrying industrialist Jean Lion. And when she saw this Renaissance chateau perched above the Dordogne, she saw the embodiment of everything she’d achieved.

A castle. A real castle. For a girl who’d grown up sleeping in cardboard shelters and scavenging food from garbage cans.

She rented it in 194o, and would go on to purchase it in 1947. And for the next two decades, Chateau des Milandes would be the center of Josephine Baker’s universe.

Weapons in the Cellar

Baker barely had time to settle in before the Germans invaded France in May 1940. As Nazi troops marched down the Champs Élysées and occupied her Paris home, Baker loaded her possessions into vans and fled to Les Milandes. She brought her gold piano, her bed that had once belonged to Marie Antoinette, and something far more dangerous.

The chateau became a center for French Resistance activity.

Baker hid Jewish refugees in the chateau’s rooms. She sheltered resistance fighters. She stored weapons in the cellar. She had a radio transmitter installed so the Resistance could communicate with Allied forces.

The Renaissance chateau with its fairy tale towers had become a fortress in the secret war against Nazi occupation.

Baker herself had become a spy. Jacques Abtey, head of French military intelligence, had recruited her in 1939. Her celebrity status made her the perfect asset, as she could travel freely, attend embassy parties, and cross borders without suspicion.

Diplomats were so starstruck they’d tell her anything. She’d scribble down intelligence about German troop movements and hide the notes inside her clothing, pinned with safety pins.

The Nazis got wind that something was happening at Les Milandes. They showed up for an impromptu search while several resistance fighters were hiding in the basement. Baker met the Germans at the door, smiled that famous smile, and charmed them so completely that they left without searching the place. It was too close, and Baker took it as a sign.

In November 1940, she and Abtey left France for Portugal, smuggling over 50 classified documents out of the country. Some of the intelligence was written in invisible ink on Baker’s sheet music, and the rest was hidden in her clothing.

From Portugal, the information went to British intelligence in London. Baker continued her spy work from North Africa, gathering intelligence to support Operation Torch, the Allied invasion of Morocco and Algeria in 1942.

In June 1941, she suffered a miscarriage followed by an emergency hysterectomy, peritonitis, and sepsis. She spent 18 months in a Casablanca hospital undergoing multiple operations. Even her hospital room became a safe meeting place for spies and diplomats. 

When she recovered, she toured Allied military camps across North Africa, sleeping on the ground next to her jeep to avoid landmines, refusing payment for her performances. For her service, General Charles de Gaulle awarded her the Croix de Guerre, the Rosette de la Resistance, and named her Chevalier of the Legion of Honor.

The Dream Takes Shape

After the war, Baker returned to Les Milandes with a new vision. In 1947, she married orchestra conductor Jo Bouillon in the chateau’s chapel and purchased the estate outright. She immediately set about transforming both the chateau and the surrounding village.

She had electricity and running water installed in the chateau and throughout the village of Milandes, which she’d purchased in 1949. She organized the first bus stops in the area, bought many of the surrounding buildings, rebuilding not just a chateau but an entire community.

But the real transformation was still to come.

Starting in 1953, Baker began adopting children. Not one or two, but twelve. Two daughters, Marianne from France and Stellina from Morocco, and ten sons from Japan, Korea, Finland, Colombia, Algeria, the Ivory Coast, Venezuela, France, and Israel. She called them her Rainbow Tribe.

Baker deliberately chose children of different races and religions. She wanted to prove that people of all backgrounds could live together as brothers. The experiment in racial harmony that she’d risked her life to fight for during the war would now play out in the rooms and gardens of her Renaissance chateau.

A Castle Becomes a Theme Park

Baker wanted the world to see what was possible. So she transformed Chateau des Milandes into a tourist attraction unlike anything France had seen. The estate became a full theme park. 

There were rides for children, a cafe and a restaurant serving Perigord cuisine, bar, jazz club, and a motel for overnight visitors. A wax museum called Jorama displayed pivotal moments from Baker’s life. Visitors could tour the chateau itself, walking through Baker’s Art Deco bathroom, her library, her office, her bedrooms with the cots where the children slept.

But the main attraction was the Rainbow Tribe themselves. Visitors watched the children play in the gardens, saw them perform, and observed this multicultural family living together in harmony.

Baker charged admission to help support the enormous expense of maintaining a Renaissance chateau and raising 12 children with an enormous staff.

She told reporters, “People can’t believe until they see for themselves that human beings of every race, color, and creed can live together as brothers. That is why we have rebuilt the village and established its attractions, so that people will come from everywhere to see the children.”

Thousands came, and during the 1950s and early 1960s, Les Milandes buzzed with activity. The children traveled the world with their mother.

They met the Pope and vacationed with Fidel Castro. They played in tree houses in the gardens and caught flying beetles to tie to strings like balloons. It was an extraordinary childhood lived in the constant glare of public attention.

The Money Runs Out

Maintaining all of this required staggering amounts of money. Baker worked relentlessly to keep the chateau afloat, but the costs of running a theme park, supporting 12 children, paying an enormous staff, and maintaining a 15th-century chateau were crushing.

Her husband, Jo Bouillon, became overwhelmed by the challenges and moved to Argentina in 1960, and they eventually divorced. Baker was left to manage everything alone while continuing to perform and raise the children.

By 1964, the chateau was put up for auction. Brigitte Bardot launched a public appeal to save it. Despite the intervention, Baker’s financial situation continued to worsen, and in 1968, creditors seized the property.

Baker was on tour when she learned the new owner had put the chateau up for sale. She rushed back to Les Milandes and barricaded herself in the kitchen, refusing to leave. The new owner sent men who forcibly evicted her. She was 62 years old, weakened, and in shock, and had to be taken to the hospital.

Baker told reporters that France had let her down. After everything she’d done during the war, after all the years she’d poured her heart and soul into creating something beautiful at Les Milandes, she’d lost it all.

Princess Grace of Monaco came to her rescue, offering Baker an apartment in Roquebrune. Baker settled there with her children and continued performing until her death in 1975.

Visiting Chateau des Milandes Today

In 2001, Claude de Labarre and her daughter, Angelique de Saint-Exupéry, purchased Château des Milandes. Angelique’s mission has been to create a museum that honors Josephine Baker’s extraordinary life, and she’s done it beautifully.

In 2012, the chateau was awarded the title Maison des Illustres, a French heritage classification reserved for sites associated with exceptional figures. Today, you enter through wrought iron gates into a courtyard with the chapel where Baker married Jo Bouillon. 

The interior preserves Baker’s presence so thoroughly you half expect to see her sweeping down the stairs. Her Art Deco bathroom, with its gleaming fixtures and bold geometric patterns, captures the glamour of the Jazz Age. 

Her library, office, and bedrooms are kept exactly as she styled them, decorated with tapestries, display cases, and original furniture. The huge kitchen and dining room, where she entertained large groups, remain intact.

The museum displays her stage costumes, including reconstructions of the famous banana skirt. You’ll see photographs documenting every phase of her life, from her poverty-stricken childhood in St. Louis to her triumphs on the Paris stage to her wartime service. Her medals and decorations are on display, including memorabilia from her work with the Resistance.

The bedrooms show the cots where the Rainbow Tribe children slept, with family photographs lining the walls. You see the rooms where this unprecedented experiment in racial harmony unfolded, where children from every corner of the globe grew up together as brothers and sisters.

The gardens remain spectacular. Vacherot’s French-style terraced design has been beautifully maintained, with fountains, century-old magnolias, boxwoods, and flowerbeds.

Today, the six-hectare park is home to 60 species of birds of prey that perform daily demonstrations for visitors, a popular attraction that keeps the chateau’s tradition of entertainment alive.

The chateau’s restaurant serves delicious Perigord cuisine and is open from March to November. During the summer months, a sandwich shop and food truck provide quick meals.

Special events and workshops are held throughout the year. Children can participate in archaeology workshops where they excavate and discover remains from past generations who lived at Les Milandes.

The Legacy

On November 30, 2021, Josephine Baker became the first Black woman inducted into the Pantheon in Paris, France’s highest honor. I saw the tomb on a recent trip to Paris over new year.

Her body remains in Monaco at her family’s request, but a cenotaph containing soil from St. Louis, where she was born, Les Milandes, where she lived for 30 years, and Monaco, where she died, was installed in the Pantheon’s crypt.

French President Emmanuel Macron welcomed her with these words: “Josephine Baker, you are entering into the Pantheon because, although you were born American, there is no greater French person than you.”

Standing in the rooms of Chateau des Milandes today, you can feel the weight of everything that happened here. The Jewish refugees who hid from the Nazis, the resistance fighters who met in secret, the weapons stored in the cellar, and the radio transmitter sending messages to Allied forces. 

And every visitor who walks through those Gothic doors gets to witness what Josephine Baker built here. Proof that a girl from the slums of St. Louis could become a star, a spy, a mother, and a legend.

Chateau des Milandes is her monument. And it’s waiting for you to discover it.