Planning a Trip to Champagne, France
Leslie and Arnaud in front of the Champagne region of France’s Château de la Motte-Tilly. August 16, 2020.
Though most people associate the Champagne region of France with its namesake and little else—and for good reason—Champagne has a lot to offer beyond the bubbly.
If you have a trip to the area on the horizon, you might want to look for a little variety in your stay and a little more to explore. What can you do in Champagne beyond the wine cellars, wineries, and vineyards?
Quite a lot, in fact! Read on.
Champagne’s Big Cities
When visiting the Champagne region of France, you can choose a base of stay in Troyes or in Reims, if you’d like to stay in a city, or you can pick any of the tiny French towns scattered around the region.
Arnaud and I visited Reims for a day trip and based ourselves in Troyes. After a little experience in both cities, we felt we made the right choice by staying in Troyes: Although Reims has far more champagne cellars for the wine lovers, Troyes has a lot more charm, feels a lot more accessible, and offers so much more in terms of surviving history and local warmth than its bigger sister city to the north.
To make your own decision for a base of stay, read my posts on Reims and on Troyes and see what you think.
L’Abbaye de Clairvaux
Astonishingly powerful in the 12th century, Bernard de Clairvaux made kings, funded movements—including the second crusade and the Knights Templar—and founded the Abbaye de Clairvaux, which he grew into a city in its own right.
The abbey continued to develop over centuries before collapsing in the face of the French revolution. In Napoleon’s time, the abbey became a prison, which it remains even today (though the government plans to relocate the prisoners elsewhere within a few years). Due to the site’s ongoing purpose as a prison, visitors cannot take photos, all visitors must have a guide, and tours limit guests to a few buildings.
The monastery has disappeared over the years, though one of the remaining ruins recently underwent extensive reconstruction. Most of the site’s remaining buildings served and currently serve as government buildings (including prison buildings).
On the tour, you’ll briefly see the reconstructed portion of the abbey and will spend most of your time and attention on the prisons of the French revolution, the Napoleonic period, and the early 20th century.
Truthfully, the tour will interest primarily people who haven’t before visited a historic prison or a restored abbey; I felt the site missed several opportunities to delve deeper into details about the history and functioning of the abbey over the years and about the prison—though I recognize the difficulty in covering such disparate subjects in a limited time.
Museums on Big Personalities
Napoléon Bonaparte attended military school not far from Troyes in the Champagne region in a small town called Brienne-le-Château. The former military school building has become a museum, Musée Napoléon, dedicated to the persona he built.
The museum felt a little nascent to me; it provides a basic overview of the man and his military efforts without the depth possible given a little more time, attention, and funding.
Knowledgeable about the area—and somewhat sentimental about it, given its place in his education—Napoleon passed several times through the region and set up camp in several homes and hotels in Troyes. Occasionally, the Troyes office of tourism will host tours focused on his passage through the area and the key military campaigns that took him there.
Another key French historical figure well known for his place in major wars: Charles de Gaulle.
While in Champagne, you can visit Charles de Gaulle’s home, La Boisserie, in Colombey-les-Deux-Eglises, and drive a bit down the road to see a large museum dedicated to him and, further up the largest hill in the area, look at a large granite cross erected in his honor.
La Boisserie feels like a time capsule of the seventies, with copious memorabilia from de Gaulle’s public life scattered among each room’s quotidian items, like television sets and board games, just as they stood when the home became a memorial after de Gaulle’s wife died.
The museum down the road has extensive modern exhibits on World War II and has a lot of interest for people curious about the time and its events.
Learn about the Knights Templar
The much mythologized Knights Templar (known in French as L’Ordre des Templars) came into existence in Champagne, founded by a French knight from Payns (or Paynes), near Troyes, named Hugues.
You can find their headquarters—or what remains of it—in the historic Troyes city center and can find a museum and other historic sites to visit and from which you can learn a bit about what we know of the order.
The blink-and-you’d-miss-it Museum of Hugues de Payns, the founder of the Knights Templar, in Champagne, France. This museum is one of the order’s several historic sites in the region. August 16, 2020.
Alas, a systematic eradication of the Knights Templar by the French monarchy eliminated much of the group’s remnants and its history, so you’ll mainly learn that we don’t know terribly much. Nevertheless, the vestiges that do remain will serve to stoke the imagination.
Le Château de la Motte-Tilly
The Château de la Motte-Tilly, built in the mid-1700s and donated to the state by the family in the late 20th century, has received recent redecoration with historic furniture that makes it feel very much more like an accessible family home than most châteaux.
You can only visit the chateau’s interior via guided tour, which the château provides in French only; if you only speak English or another language, you should prepare to look and absorb visually without understanding much of what the guide describes. (You won’t miss much through simple looking—unless you love the history of furniture styles—as the guided tour mainly focuses on details about how the furnishings in each room fit into different decorating trends over the centuries.)
Planning Your Visit to Champagne, France
You’ll want to rent a car to access the sites in Champagne, France. Though a train from another major city in France or elsewhere in Europe will take you to Troyes or Reims, you’ll have a hard time finding trains to the wine cellars and off-the-beaten path sites I’ve described.
With a car at your disposal, you can pick a base of stay in a major city or in a boutique hotel located in one of the smaller towns or remote areas, from which you can visit Troyes, Reims, wine cellars, and beyond. (For the how-to details, read my article with tips for tourists driving in France.)
And if you have a little time—and as you have a car—you can easily pop across into the Burgundy region to see a few more castles, too!