Château de Tiffauges

The castle was probably raised by Geoffroy de Thouars at the beginning of the 12th century, on an oval granite plateau of 220 by 150 metres above the confluence of the Sèvre Nantaise and the Crûme. The site sits in the Marches between Brittany, Poitou and Anjou; built facing Anjou, it had added protection against attackers. The village strung along the Crûme at the foot of the promontory was itself enclosed by a rampart with towers.

The square Romanesque keep went up with its gatehouse in the first quarter of the 12th century, eighteen metres to a side and twenty-four metres tall, its corners carried on flattened buttresses in the manner of the Thouars castles. The seigneurial chapel of Saint-Vincent belongs to the same century; its apse holds one of the few Romanesque crypts surviving in the Vendée. The plateau was ringed by a wall flanked by twenty towers, reinforced between 1280 and 1340 with towers pierced for archers.

In 1420 Gilles de Rais abducted and then married Catherine de Thouars, daughter of Miles II de Thouars, lord of Pouzauges and Tiffauges; annulled at first for consanguinity, the union was regularised in 1422. Under the marriage contract Tiffauges and Pouzauges remained in dower to Miles II's widow, Béatrice de Montjean, and her remarriage to Jacques Meschin de la Roche-Aireault, chamberlain of Charles VII, set off a succession dispute. Gilles de Rais and his grandfather Jean de Craon had Béatrice de Montjean abducted to force her to renounce the dower. Despite proceedings before the Parlement of Paris and several convictions that went unenforced, they finally obtained possession of both castles.

In 1440 Gilles de Rais was condemned to death for heresy, sodomy and the murder of numerous children. The confessions recorded at his trial place some of those crimes at Tiffauges. His byname, Barbe-bleue, gave the castle its second name, the château de Barbe-bleue.

The keep was partly destroyed during the Hundred Years' War, and in answer to that destruction the lords strengthened it with a chemise, a second wall doubling the first, built around 1420–1460 across its north, east and south faces; the west front was covered by the tower-gate. The chemise was flanked by a projecting square tower with a drawbridge, the châtelet.

Catherine de Thouars remarried Jean II de Vendôme, vidame de Chartres, who in 1520 raised the tower that carries his title. The tour du Vidame is a heavy horseshoe-plan artillery tower with very thick walls, of the type built just before the bastioned plan was devised in Italy; its wall-walk rests on thirty-seven machicolations. Between 1490 and 1530 the boulevards and the Pertuis, Ronde and Vidame towers gave the fortress its final extent, and the lordship afterwards passed to Jean III, son of Catherine and Jean II.

In 1563 the duc de Thouars inherited Tiffauges, ceding it to Bérande de Ferrière, who passed it to her brother Jean de Ferrière. The castle was attacked repeatedly and burned in 1569 during the Wars of Religion. A royal ordinance of 1626 directing its dismantling seems to have had little effect overall, though in that year Richelieu had the upper part of the keep struck down, filling it with several tonnes of rubble. The fortifications were already ruined when Esprit Jousseaume de La Bretesche became the owner in 1702; his family held the site for two and a half centuries.

The castle had a part in the battle of Torfou on 19 September 1793, the last Vendéen victory. A hacquebut of the 16th century has been found in the castle ditches. In 1885 the architect Georges-Eugène Balleyguier cleared and surveyed the ruins.

The castle stood abandoned in ruins for a long stretch, its wide interior used for a time as the football pitch of the local club, the Réveil sportif teiphalien. It was sold to the commune for a symbolic franc in 1955; municipal works carried out without excavation made some of the ruins disappear, and archaeological work and restoration began at the end of the 1980s.

All the remains of the castle, with those of the chapel and the crypt, were classified as a historical monument by decree of 9 July 1957, and the castle's dam on the Crûme, with its causeway, water intakes and channels, was inscribed by decree of 14 September 2018. Visitor traffic grew from the 1990s; since 2002 the site has belonged to the departmental council of the Vendée, which stages performances about Gilles de Rais and keeps a reconstructed alchemy laboratory and a collection of medieval war machines.