Château de Clisson

At the meeting of the marches of Brittany, Anjou and Poitou, facing the French strongholds of Tiffauges and Montaigu, Clisson was one of the great frontier fortresses of the then independent Duchy of Brittany. The first lords of Clisson held the granite promontory above the Sèvre Nantaise from the early eleventh century; their first certain appearance in the records is dated 1040 by some accounts and 1061 by others. The castle began between 1058 and 1060 as a simple castrum, its enclosures made of wooden palings, or clis, from which the name Clisson is thought to come. Clisson was the seat of a powerful châtellenie covering twenty-three parishes, and until the early thirteenth century the site appears to have been held by a Romanesque fortress: a massive keep on buttresses standing inside an enceinte.

The oldest surviving parts of the castle date from the early thirteenth century, before 1217. Guillaume de Clisson, born about 1175 and dead before 1225, set the new defences on the rocky spur above the river, in the form of two irregular polygons flanked by cylindrical towers and cut off from the plateau by a shallow ditch, with a barbican added at the end of a curtain wall to guard the entrance. The tour Saint-Louis, raised in the same century, carries the name of Louis IX of France, who stayed at the castle in 1230. In the 1240s the castle was probably demolished on the order of Duke Jean le Roux, in the course of a quarrel between Guillaume's grandson Olivier II de Clisson and his two half-brothers.

In the fourteenth century Olivier III de Clisson built a gatehouse into the approach to the courtyard, later remodelled into a heavy quadrangular keep. The castle then became the setting for the violent careers of Olivier IV and Olivier V de Clisson. Olivier IV, held to have come to terms with the English, was beheaded at Les Halles in Paris on 2 August 1343 on the order of Philippe VI of Valois; his wife Jeanne de Belleville fled to England with their son, Olivier V. The younger man recovered the family possessions after taking the French side, and in 1380 was made Constable of France in succession to Du Guesclin. He was born in the castle but lived there very little, and Clisson was probably left in the charge of a castellan. Jeanne is said to haunt the place still.

After 1420 the castle went out of the family altogether. Marguerite de Clisson, daughter of Olivier V and countess of Penthièvre, was accused of treason against Duke Jean V of Brittany and stripped of her property; on 29 September 1420 the castle became the duke's and was granted in apanage to Richard d'Étampes. The Penthièvre party fled, but left a garrison quartered in the town, and Richard had to besiege both castle and town before he could take up what he had been given. The town gave in quickly, surrendering shortly before 5 October 1420.

The castle became one of the favourite residences of Duke Francis II of Brittany, son of Richard d'Étampes, who was remarried there to Marguerite de Foix in the 1470s and who held lavish feasts and hunts on the site. The concern of the duke and his heirs was the southern face of the fortress, which covered the southern approach to Nantes. An outer barbican was built in 1456, separated from the older one by the ditch of the earlier castle and pierced with embrasures for guns; it was known as the bastion des Ormes for the two elms that grew inside it. In 1480 Francis ordered a new enceinte that took this second barbican in.

Francis put Guion le Heuc in charge of the main works, which ran from 1464 to 1488. The castle was extended westwards by a new rectangular enclosure nearly a hundred metres long, armed with towers carrying artillery casemates and closed at its western end by two round towers. The old entrance was altered and the curtain lengthened and completed with a barbican; a fausse braie was laid out in the southern ditch to let the defenders sortie, and bastions with orillons finished the southern defences, giving three lines of defence in depth. In the same century the castle was built into the walled circuit of the town, whose southern rampart was the castle's own outer wall, with the fortified seigneurial mill on the riverbank divided from the castle by the Bondonneau gate.

Until the seventeenth century the castle was the residence of the Avaugour family, descended from François Ier d'Avaugour, illegitimate son of Francis II, who altered and refitted it to the taste of the day in tuffeau stone. The second half of the sixteenth century was disturbed by the wars of the League. Brittany was Catholic while Poitou was held by the Protestants, notably at Montaigu, and Clisson became a key strongpoint again. The Duke of Mercœur, a Leaguer, put troops into it in 1587, and in 1588 Charles d'Avaugour, lord of Clisson since 1586, borrowed powder to defend a castle that had become a first-choice target for the Calvinists. Henri de Navarre, the future Henri IV, at the head of the Huguenots of Montaigu, threatened to attack Clisson in September 1588 and then gave up the idea, fearing a long siege of the fortress.

Charles d'Avaugour declared for Henri III in 1589 and stayed loyal to the French monarchy when Henri IV came to the throne, and Clisson became a base of support against Mercœur. He led raids around Nantes against the Leaguers, and was taken prisoner on one of them. After the victory of Henri IV, money was levied in 1596 on the property of the Nantes Leaguers to pay for work on the fortifications of Clisson, given the strategic importance of the site. The great gatehouse fell in the middle of the seventeenth century. Henri François d'Avaugour died without issue on 2 September 1746, and the Avaugour lands and titles passed to Charles de Rohan, who took no interest in the castle and ordered its contents sold; the sale ran from 18 November 1748 over the following days and carried off much of great historical value, parchments among it.

The owners abandoned the fortress after that, and various families lived in its apartments until 1793. During the war in the Vendée the army of Mainz made the castle its headquarters. After their defeat at the battle of Torfou, Canclaux and his republican troops halted at Clisson and, in 1793, burned the castle and the town before leaving; other accounts credit the burning of town and castle to the infernal columns of Jean-Baptiste Kléber. The fire cost the two keep towers their floors and their roofs. On 8 February 1794, during the killing raids of the infernal columns, some thirty people hiding in the ruins of the castle had their throats cut, were thrown alive into a well, or were shot on the southern esplanade.

After the Revolution the houses of the town had to be rebuilt, and the ruined castle served the people of Clisson as a stone quarry. The sculptor François-Frédéric Lemot came to the town early in the nineteenth century through his friends Pierre and François Cacault, and bought the ruins in 1807 to preserve them: “Long afflicted by the destruction of almost all our Gothic buildings, I hastened to buy this one, with the sole intention of carefully preserving this monument.” He repaired the roofs of the two rectangular eastern towers in 1809, and in 1812 published a Notice historique on the town and castle of Clisson. The restoration he undertook with his steward Gautret had no archaeological purpose: he cleared away the seventeenth-century tuffeau buildings and treated the ruins as an ornament for the park of the Garenne Lemot, which he acquired a few years later across the Sèvre. Through the nineteenth century the ruins drew Romantic painters and sculptors; Jean Metzinger's Le château de Clisson of 1905 hangs in the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Nantes, and the Fauve artist André Derain also drew the castle.

The ruins were classed as a monument historique by decree of 13 August 1924. In 1962 the Lemot family sold the castle to the conseil général of the Loire-Atlantique, which carried out important restoration work with the help of the Ministry of Culture, in campaigns running from 1974 to 1975, from 1986 to 1989 and from 1991 to 1993; the lodgings in the two western towers were restored by the compagnons du devoir. The classification was completed on 30 August 2004 by the listing of the southern and south-eastern bastions with their linking rampart, a tower of the town wall, the tour du Cul Chaud, the dry ditches north of the castle, the masonry bridge from the rue du Château and the glacis below the southern bastions. The castle is open to visitors through the year, with explanatory texts and films on the history of Clisson and of the building itself, and it is used for cultural events and performances.