Château de Foix

The castle at Foix is first recorded in a charter from the early 11th century, though it was probably built a little earlier. By 1002 it was substantial enough to be named in the will of Roger I, Count of Carcassonne, who bequeathed it to his youngest child, Bernard — the first to hold the title Count of Foix, from around 1012. From 1034 the castle was capital of the County of Foix; the family installed there controlled access to the upper Ariège valley and could watch over the lower country from behind impregnable walls.

In 1211 the crusader commander Simon de Montfort besieged Toulouse, failed to take the city, and turned to ravage the allied county of Foix instead — though his forces did little more than winter at Pamiers and raid as far as Foix itself. Renewed operations in 1212 touched the town's outskirts but left the castle untroubled. It was submission, not storm, that changed hands: in 1214 the castle was handed to the pope's legate as a token of submission and opened to Montfort, and the count did not recover it until 1218. Cathars are attested in the county during these years, though the castle itself, by most later accounts, was never their refuge — the counts worked instead to preserve their own independence.

The Treaty of Meaux-Paris in 1229 cut the eastern edge from the county, isolating the lordship of Mirepoix, and the castle was occupied by the king of France for five years. Roger IV, count from 1241, withheld his military support from the count of Toulouse in 1242 for the first time since the crusade began — a refusal that helped doom Toulouse's last revolt — and kept clear of the Montségur affair that followed. In 1272 the count of Foix made a final stand against the crown's encroachment, strengthening the garrison, the gates and the ramparts with siege engines; but faced with the large army Philippe le Hardi gathered from across France, he submitted, was taken prisoner to Carcassonne, and saw the castle and county placed under sequestration until 1285.

Gaston Fébus, count from 1343 to 1391, defeated the rival house of Armagnac at Launac in 1362 in a dispute over his inheritance of Béarn. Many great lords of the south-west were taken prisoner in the battle and locked in Foix's castle — among them the counts of Armagnac and Comminges, the lords of Albret, Jean de la Barte and the lords of Pardalha — held for months until their families raised the ransoms that freed them, after which they were moved on to Pamiers and then Mazères. Ransom money probably funded building work Fébus carried out at his castles, including Foix, though the counts increasingly preferred more comfortable residences at Orthez and Mazères, and the Governors' Palace below the rock.

From 1479 the counts of Foix were also kings of Navarre; the last of them, become Henri IV, annexed his Pyrenean lands to France. In 1486 the castle changed hands by force for the only time on record, seized through treachery in a war between two branches of the Foix family. As seat of the region's governor from the 15th century it continued to defend the area through the Wars of Religion. Cardinal Richelieu's regional demolition order of 1632–1638 pulled down some ten castles in the Ariège valley, Pamiers and Mazères among them; Foix came close to the same fate, but here the order was never carried out.

Its towers served as a political and civil prison for four centuries, a role that intensified after the Revolution when the penitentiary passed to the new département of Ariège, until overcrowding forced the prisoners out to a new town gaol in the 1860s. Listed as a monument historique since 1840 and restored under Paul Boeswillwald, the castle has housed the collections of the Ariège departmental museum since 1930, and remains owned today by the Ariège department.