History
The best specialists agree that its name dates back to the Gallo-Roman period.
But, due to a lack of convincing documents, it is impossible to give a precise date for the founding of its castle; the latter's historic function was to guard the north-south passage between Upper and Lower Lotharingia - those famous "Avenues des François" taken during all invasions up to and including 1940.
The castle's history closely shadows that of the town and the duchy and has three quite distinct periods:
* The dukes of the house of Ardenne, of which Godfrey of Bouillon was the fifth and last of the name, owned it until 1096. It was in that year that Godfrey of Bouillon sold his entire duchy (with the possibility of buying his property back within three years) to Otbert, the Prince Bishop of Liège, who pillaged the churches and convents of his own diocese to pay for it. In this way our duke helped cover the costs of the first crusade and conquered Jerusalem dying there in 1100 with the title "Warden of the Holy Sepulchre" having refused to wear the golden crown of the King of Jerusalem "there where Christ wore a crown of thorns".
* The Prince Bishops of Liège, the second set of Dukes of Bouillon, after many mixed fortunes, kept it for nearly six centuries.
* They ended up by losing ownership of it after being usurped by the La Marck family: the prince bishops, to make things easy for themselves, had delegated their powers to governors and, in 1430, appointed Count Evrard III de la Marck, one of the great feudal lords of the principality, as governor. This family was very active, ambitious and, above all, unscrupulous. This was so much the case that at the start of the 16th century, the head of the family took the title of Duke of Bouillon at the same time as the Prince Bishop of Liège. In 1591, Henri de la Tour d'Auvergne, father of the great Turenne, married Charlotte de la Marck who died childless but left him her properties and titles; this is how the La Tour d'Auvergne family bear the title of Duke of Bouillon without owning the castle. As active as the La Marcks were, they ended up having to hand over the town and the duchy in 1678 to Louis XIV who had conquered it in 1676. This handover was confirmed officially in the treaties of Nijmegen (1679) and Rijswyck (1697).
Throughout the 18th century, Bouillon was like an oasis of freedom until 24 April 1794, when the people's assembly of the duchy - which included approximately 150 villages - proclaimed a republic. Then, according to the words of an author of the last century, "the shark from the Seine snapped up the Republican gudgeon from the Semois": on 26 October 1795 it was integrated, purely and simply, into the French republic (Forest Department).
After Waterloo, the second treaty of Paris (20 November 1815) reunited the old sovereign land of Bouillon with the Netherlands. And in 1830, during the Belgian revolution, our duchy was finally integrated into Belgium.