Château de Châteaubriant

A castrum brientii is recorded in 1028, its site unknown. Brient, the first known lord, held it as a vassal of the count of Rennes in the Pays de la Mée, a buffer between the counties of Rennes, Nantes and Angers. The first castle was timber, with a dry moat and a wet one, and a square keep rebuilt in stone around 1100, its walls 3.5 m thick. In 1223 Amaury de Craon sacked the barony with Angevin, Manceau and Norman help, and Duke Pierre Mauclerc's support for baron Geoffroy IV ended in a Breton victory at Béré. In 1234 Louis IX took Châteaubriant and its castle in an expedition against Mauclerc, who then submitted.

Geoffroy VIII, last of Brient's male line, fell at La Roche-Derrien in 1347. His sister Louise inherited and married Guy XII de Laval in 1348, and Guy held for Charles de Blois; Bertrand du Guesclin used Châteaubriant as a refuge during the war. The keep and halls were rebuilt in the 14th century, and in 1432 Duke John V made the castle his base for the siege of Pouancé. On Louise's death in 1383 the barony went to a distant cousin, Charles de Dinan, and passed in time to Françoise de Dinan, who married Guy XIV de Laval after the death in 1450 of Gilles of Brittany, the duke's brother, who had abducted and married her.

Françoise de Dinan drew close to the marshal de Rieux against Duke Francis II, and the treaty of Châteaubriant, by which Breton barons asked the King of France to settle an internal quarrel, betrayed the duke's authority and was one of the reasons for the Mad War. Charles VIII lodged in the castle on 14 August 1487; Rieux and Françoise then turned back to the duke. In March 1488 the king gathered twelve thousand men at Tours, attacked Châteaubriant on 15 April and took it on 23 April. Archaeology places the breach at the Tour de la Torche on the north-west angle, probably opened by a cannon set across the Chère, and the north flank carries the attackers' sapping. The town lost 236 houses to fire, and the king ordered the castle dismantled at once.

Anne of Brittany granted Françoise a hundred thousand écus in 1490. The queen's marriage to Charles VIII in 1491 reduced the castle's strategic importance, and the rebuilding that followed was for comfort: wide windows cut through the keep and the halls, Flamboyant fireplaces within, and a bastion at the south-west angle against modern artillery.

Françoise de Dinan ordered a new palace in the lower bailey, called the Bâtiment des Gardes since the Revolution, when the National Guard occupied it. It was finished after her death in 1499, by which time Châteaubriant had come to her grandson Jean de Laval, who commissioned a second wing from the local architect Jean Delespine, built after 1532 in Italian taste. His wife Françoise de Foix, mistress of Francis I, died in the night of 16 October 1537, amid rumours that her husband had killed her out of jealousy.

Jean de Laval died heirless in 1543 and left his titles to the Constable of France, Anne de Montmorency, who completed the works but kept his residence at Écouen. The Montmorencys held the barony until 1632, when Henri II de Montmorency was dispossessed and beheaded for felony, and it passed to the Princes of Condé, who kept it to the Revolution but lived at Chantilly and in Paris. The keep's roof fell in after a storm around 1720 and was not restored.

Louis V de Bourbon-Condé left France for England in 1789 and the town's National Guard moved into the château. Returned to the prince under the Restoration, the estate was sold to the mayor, Martin Connesson. In 1839 the council considered pulling down the keep for stone for a school and a bridge; the project met strong opposition and the château entered the first list of monuments historiques in 1840. The town sold it to the Duke of Aumale in 1845, and he sold it on to the département in 1853 after following his father Louis-Philippe I into exile.

In 1887 the département, with no money for the repairs required, asked for the château to be struck off the list; campaigns from 1909 worked mainly on the keep, and the classification was restored on 11 July 1921. An American bombing raid destroyed the southern end of the Renaissance palace in 1944. The offices left one by one: the police in 1971, the library in 2006, the court in 2009, the sous-préfecture in 2012. The departmental council of Loire-Atlantique owns the château, which has never been fully opened: visitors reach the wards and a few rooms, among them the Chambre dorée and the Bâtiment des Gardes.