Château de Tarascon

A first castle rose on this rock beside the Rhône over the ruins of a Roman castrum, built most likely by Roubaud II, Marquis of Provence, between 994 and 1010, to hold the river and to meet enemy attack. It faces the Château de Beaucaire across the water and secured the western border of Provence.

In 1232 the burghers of the town rose in support of the Counts of Toulouse and left the castle severely damaged. It was rebuilt, occupied in the mid-thirteenth century by Charles of Anjou, Count of Provence and brother of Louis IX, and extensively renovated in 1291 by his son Charles II, called the Lame.

In 1367 Duke Louis of Anjou, governor of Languedoc and brother of Charles V of France, set out to put his own authority in place of that of Queen Jeanne, Countess of Provence, taking advantage of her absence and of Pope Urban V's departure for Rome. His captain was Bertrand Du Guesclin, freed in December 1367 after his capture at Nájera. Du Guesclin marched on 26 February 1368 with 2,000 men and laid siege on 4 March, blockading the town on every side. His trebuchets caused several deaths in the town, among them Tarascon's clavaire, Martin Champsaur. The town capitulated on 20 or 22 March 1368, and was retaken in September 1370 by the companies of Raimond de Turenne.

After the murder of the lord Charles Duras in 1386 the new prince of Provence, Louis II, made his entry into the region, and the townspeople answered it with a civil war that left castle and town completely destroyed.

Returning from Italy, Louis II of Anjou ordered the rebuilding on the same site on 27 November 1400. Work went quickly, was broken off some years later, and was resumed from 1428 to 1435 by his son Louis III. The architect was Jean Robert, with the sculptors Simon de Beaujeu and Jacques Morel, and the stone came from the quarries at Beaucaire. Round towers, stronger and easier to defend, took the most exposed face, while square towers were kept on the Rhône side at a date when the rest of France had given them up. The curtains rose to the full height of the towers they join, giving one continuous level of defence and movement, as at the Bastille in Paris.

René of Anjou made only small alterations, from 1447 to 1449, under Jean and Regnault de Serocourt, captain and lieutenant of Tarascon, to render the place more habitable, and set busts of himself and Queen Jeanne de Laval in a niche of the courtyard; probably the work of Francesco Laurana, they were mutilated at the Revolution. Twenty bombards and three further artillery pieces were mounted, probably on the terraces crowning the castle. Between 1476 and 1479 René had the drawbridge replaced by a fixed bridge. He kept the fortress as a place of ceremony, meeting and festivity, and it gave shelter to Jacques Cœur when he fled after Charles VII condemned him to death.

On the death of René's heir Charles IV the county of Provence was ceded to Louis XI. From 1481 the castle served only occasionally as a lodging for the king's agents, its interest gone both as a stronghold and as a royal residence.

The fortress survived two further attempted sieges, in 1586 and in 1652. From the eighteenth century until 1926 it served as a prison, holding prisoners of war and in particular enemy sailors, and during the Revolution supporters of Maximilien Robespierre were executed inside it. Graffiti survives throughout the building: one chamber used as a cell in the fifteenth century carries cut drawings of medieval ships and war galleys by a Catalan sailor or sailors held by the king, with religious and profane scratchings beside them, and a survey of the inscriptions has yielded a typology of the prisoners by nationality, origin or day of imprisonment. Still in use as a prison, the castle was designated a national historic monument in 1840.

After the prison closed in 1926 the state acquired the castle in 1932, restored it and opened it to the public as a museum. The damage the prison years had done was made good by the architects Henri-Antoine Révoil and Jean-Camille Formigé, whose restorations put the crenellation back.

Allied forces attacked Tarascon in the summer of 1944, the first raid falling on 25 June against the bridges over the Rhône. The old town was extensively damaged, but the castle came through the war relatively unscathed and reopened once restoration was finished. The French Ministry of Culture held it until 2008, and it works now as the Centre d'art René d'Anjou.