Château de Dourdan

Dourdan sits halfway along the road from Paris to Chartres, at the heart of what had been the forest of the Carnutes in antiquity; though largely cleared for farming, the woodland stayed dense around the town through the Middle Ages, and made it a hunting ground prized by its various occupants. In Merovingian and Carolingian times authority at Dordincum, the Latin name of Dourdan, was exercised by the Robertians, a Frankish noble family established in Neustria, in the person of Robert the Strong. His son Hugh the Great settled there with his wife Hedwig of Saxony and had a first castle of wood and earth built about a hundred metres north-west of the present one, and in it was born his own son Hugh Capet, first king of France and founder of the Capetian dynasty. That building lasted long enough for Louis VI and Louis VII to keep it as a hunting residence and to develop abbeys, churches, banal rights and trade fairs around it, drawing on the Paris to Chartres road and on the Orge. The châtellenie of Dourdan formed part of the royal domain from the 10th century.

At the beginning of the 13th century Philip Augustus was at war with the Plantagenets, and sought to impose royal power and secure his territory through heavy and ostentatious stone architecture. Around 1190 his master of works, Master Eudes, launched a programme of 52 fortresses across the royal domain, rationalising the plans and pursuing symmetry and regularity in a system later called Philippian: a square plan ringed by dry ditches, flanking towers pierced with arrow loops, a fortified gatehouse, a wall-walk, a courtyard, lodgings, outbuildings and an isolated keep. Built between 1220 and 1222, the fortress of Dourdan was no exception, and followed the plan of the castle of the Louvre, finished in 1202, except in the placing of the great tower, which stood at the centre of the enclosure in Paris and to the north at Dourdan. Its architecture also takes up features found at Gisors, Angers and Montreuil-Bellay, and it is reckoned the most accomplished of Philip Augustus's castles as well as the last built under his reign: the king died in 1223, a year after it was completed. The principle of the isolated keep was used again at Flint in Wales and at Yverdon in Switzerland, and a near-identical castle stands at Seringes-et-Nesles in Aisne.

In 1240 Louis IX gave the castle to his mother Blanche of Castile, and in 1260 to his wife Margaret of Provence. It then served as a hunting seat for Philip III and for Philip IV, who granted it in 1307 to his brother the Count of Évreux. In 1314, in the wake of the Tour de Nesle scandal, Joan II, Countess of Burgundy, daughter-in-law of Philip IV and for a time compromised by the affair, was shut in the keep; she was held there until 1315.

The castle became the property of Jean de Berry in 1385, and he added the fortifications of the town. That did not prevent the sacking of Dourdan by the English in 1428, during the Hundred Years' War, nor the imprisonment in the keep in 1430 of Étienne de Vignolles, called La Hire, one of Joan of Arc's comrades-in-arms, who escaped the following year. In 1477 Louis XI brought the castle back into the royal domain.

In 1512 the domain was made over to Louis Malet de Graville to repay the king's debt, and reverted to Louis XII on Graville's death. It formed part of the succession of 1522 in favour of Francis I, who gave it in 1526 to his favourite Anne de Pisseleu, countess of Étampes. Henry II recovered it in 1547 and sold it to François de Guise.

In 1567, in the course of the Wars of Religion, Protestant forces sacked the town, and the captain of the garrison took refuge in the keep. The keep itself was taken on 17 May 1591. Henry IV then gave the castle to his superintendent of finances, Nicolas Harlay de Sancy, who built the ranges set against the southern curtain wall, and afterwards to the Duke of Sully, who had the ditch surrounding the keep filled in and added stables.

In 1611 Louis XIII bought the castle back in order to give it to his mother Marie de' Medici, who in 1624 had a guard house built to lodge musketeers. In 1652 Louis XIV gave it to his own mother, Anne of Austria; in 1672 it passed to Philippe d'Orléans, who in 1690 turned it into a royal prison. The gaol registers of the revolutionary period record as many as 300 prisoners held there. In 1792 the castle became the property of the department of Seine-et-Oise, which kept the prison running until 1819, when it was downgraded to a municipal prison with an attached military depot; both lasted until 1852.

The castle was bought in 1852 by Amédée Guénée, who passed it to his cousin Ludovic Guyot, who in turn left it to his son Louis-Joseph Guyot. In 1961 Guyot's daughter, the comtesse Gaillard de la Valdène, sold it to the commune of Dourdan on a life annuity. A period of restoration followed. The castle was classified a historic monument by order of 9 December 1964; the north-east tower was restored in 1972, the ditches around the keep were cleared between 1975 and 1977, the roof and part of the courtyard front were renewed between 1980 and 1982, then the keep, a corner tower and the curtain walls between 1983 and 1984, and finally all the courtyard fronts and the arrow slits of the gatehouse between 1986 and 1987. The keep now houses a museum of local history.