Pleujouse

Pleujouse occupies a side valley of the Asuel stream, in the Baroche, in the eastern Ajoie at the foot of the folded Jura. The site is closed in: wooded heights surround it — La Chaud to the north, Les Aidjolats to the east, the Grande Roche to the south, the high point at 825 metres — and it is along that ridge that the watershed between the Rhine and the Rhône runs. The village itself, at 580 metres, amounts to one street of white-rendered farms under brown roofs. It has no church and belongs to the parish of Charmoille; a chapel, raised in 1881, serves instead.

What made the village stands above it. On a shelf of rock, the castle was built around 1100 by the lords of Pleujouse. Of the original parts, the curtain walls remain and a round keep with a raised entrance. At the end of the 14th century the fortress passed to the bishopric of Basel, which then granted it in fief to various noble families. The dwelling range, later in date, burned in 1980; it has since been restored.

The name is older than the walls: it appears as early as 1105 as a designation of origin, Lutfrido de Pluiusa, and comes from the Latin pluviosus, “rainy” — either for the weather here, or for the stream that swells in the rain and along which the village lines up. German long said Nùwenburc, then Blutzhusen. Pleujouse is no longer a commune: on 1 January 2009 it merged with Asuel, Charmoille, Fregiécourt and Miécourt to form La Baroche. It was then among the smallest communes in the canton of Jura, with 91 inhabitants at the end of 2007 on a territory of 1.8 km², two thirds of it forest.

Why this place is remarkable

What strikes here is a matter of scale: a handful of farms in a valley of 1.8 km², and above them a fortress founded around 1100, which gave the place its German name and its reason to exist. The round keep, with its raised entrance, belongs to the original parts. Around it, forest covers more than two thirds of the ground, and the ridge closing the valley to the south divides the basins of the Rhine and the Rhône.

History and origin

Pleujouse followed the fate of the Ajoie, which entered the prince-bishopric of Basel in 1271, and from the 16th to the 18th century came under the mayoralty of Alle. From 1793 to 1815 the village was French — in the département of Mont-Terrible, then in that of Haut-Rhin; the Congress of Vienna returned it to the canton of Bern in 1815, and it passed to the canton of Jura when the latter was created, on 1 January 1979. The population has fallen steadily: 239 inhabitants in 1850, 76 in 1990, before a slight recovery.