Board 8
46°39'52.581"N 6°19'53.218"E - 1'022.7 m
The Villa Bunau-Varilla
or the « Haute-Roche » manor house, a legendary site
It dominates the Le Pont village from on high. It’s intriguing. It’s called by many names: the Bunau-Varilla villa, the Haute-Roche manor house, the Morning Villa House, or even by the name coined by the local architect Campiotti: the Mountain Villa House.
The Bunau-Varilla family came to the Grand Hotel of the Lake of Joux during the month of January 1911 and stayed until August of the same year. This Parisian family obviously was well-pleased with the area, and it was certainly around this time that the head of the family decided to have their own villa built in the Le Pont village.
He evidently was able to get the paperwork and permits pushed through rather quickly with the Abbaye Administration services because they were able to begin construction in 1912. The villa was completed in 1914. During construction, the Bunau-Varilla family – as well as Hennebique their architect – lived at the Grand Hotel. Hennebique employed the same system he used in Paris: assemble the beams, columns and planks with iron attachments held in place by stirrups.
In 1922, the French painter Henri Deluermoz (1876-1943), probably a friend of the owners, produced several frescos on the walls of the villa of medieval and rural allegories. These frescos were beautifully done; however they’ve been greatly degraded by humidity throughout the years the villa has been abandoned.
Maurice Bunau-Varilla was a fascinating man. He lived from 1856 to August 1st, 1944. A businessman and news agency director, he and his brother created a company that would attempt to build the Panama Canal. After that, he invested in the French newspaper “Le Matin” and became one of its principal stockholders, eventually becoming a member of the administration council on 28 December 1899 and then President of the Council on 23 December 1901.
Working off a publicity-based business model, the Matin newspaper distribution soared from 285,000 in 1902 to 1 million by 1913. The newspaper’s political bias was highly influenced by the personal interests of Mr. Bunau-Varilla: radical, secular, nationalist and anti-parliamentary. He directed his journalists to focus on attention-grabbing headlines and aggressive articles. In 1917, the newspaper hit a new circulation record of 1.6 million. Bunau-Varilla was opposed to Georges Clemenceau, the President of France at the time, and supported the totalitarian regimes that were beginning to gain power in Europe. That view, however, caused his newspaper sales to begin to plumet. In fact, from 1918 to 1939, the circulation went from over a million to less than 320,000. And still, Bunau-Varilla wouldn’t alter the Matin’s political bias. On the contrary, he attacked the Popular Front movement and Edouard Daladier’s government and aligned himself with the far right – especially fascist Italy – as well as with Adolf Hitler.
After the defeat of June 1940, Bunau-Varilla supported the Vichy Regime’s policy of collaboration. He died on August 1st, 1944 and the Matin newspaper ceased publishing on August 17th. Maurice Bunau-Varilla’s son, Guy Bunau-Varilla, was one of the Matin’s associates and had also been implicated in the political views of the newspaper. He was condemned to a lifetime of forced labour in January of 1946. The newspaper’s vast building was seized by the French Republic until it was sold to a family aid housing organization which is still there today.
Maurice Bunau-Varilla was indeed a controversial person. At the town of the Pont, where his political views weren’t that well-known, his relationship with the locals seems to have been purely business. He purchased the famous lamp manufacture and worked with Jacques Fantoli, an entrepreneur from the Charbonnières, in modernizing its enormous building. But he was never on very friendly terms with the local population. It is however possible that he helped finance the second steam-powered boat in 1912 since it was given the name “Le Matin”, just like Bunau-Varilla’s newspaper.
It would’ve been interesting to have more local accounts of the Pont inhabitants concerning this rich French family... Roger Falquet, a local watch-maker, remembers that his mother – who worked for the family as a laundress – had mixed feelings about her employer’s household.
In the Vallée de Joux, there were however some strange legends circulating at the time about the mysterious Bunau-Varilla villa house and its family. Claude Berney, a local author, told of a well-known rumour of enormous canons apparently installed in the basement that would be able to fire all the way to the Rousses fort in France!
In any case, the Haute-Roche manor house remains legendary and mysterious.
