Château de Vitré

Around the year 1000 the baron Riwallon de Vitré raised a timber castle on a motte where the church of Sainte-Croix now stands. Its form is unknown; it appears as the vetus castrum in records between 1066 and 1076, and it burned on many occasions. It was abandoned for a new stone castle built at the end of the eleventh century by the baron Robert I of Vitré, on a broad rocky promontory of schist standing some thirty metres above the Vilaine. A Romanesque porch survives from that building.

The rebuilding of the castle in its present triangular plan, and the fortifying of the town with it, are traditionally credited to the baron André III in the first half of the thirteenth century. The architecture shows the influence of the Philippian model, the castle following the crest of the rocky spur and ringed with dry ditches. At André III's death the domain passed by marriage to the family of the counts of Laval.

Between 1384 and 1430 the castle was rebuilt and heavily reworked for Guy XII de Laval and his descendants. The last defensive works were carried out by the two ladies of Laval — Anne, baroness of Vitré, and Isabelle of Brittany: the gatehouse with its double drawbridge, the Madeleine tower, and the Saint-Laurent tower, later pierced with gun-ports. Standing above what was then marshy ground near the lower town gate, the Saint-Laurent was a keep in all but name and served as the governor's lodging. The larger transformation of these decades, though, was the shift from a defensive building to a comfortable residence.

The renovation of around 1420 had a second purpose: the assertion of a seigneurial power shaken by the arrival of the English in Maine. The castle became the refuge of the counts of Laval, in particular when the English took Laval itself in 1427.

By Bertrand d'Argentré's account, during the Mad War, on 1 September 1487, Guy XV de Laval opened the gates of his castle and of the town to the royal troops without a fight. The chronicler records the instruction he left — to let the French into his castle of Vitré by night through a postern, and by that means make them masters of the town. The decision was taken against the will of the inhabitants and put to them as a fait accompli.

Comfort took precedence over defence into the sixteenth century: circulation galleries were built, and a Renaissance oratory in 1530. The tuffeau apse-let on the Oratory tower was the work of Guy XVI and is among the earliest appearances of Renaissance art in Brittany, its carving interlacing the arms of the count of Laval, encircled by the collar of the Order of Saint-Michel, with those of his wives Charlotte of Aragon, Anne de Montmorency and Antoinette de Daillon. The Parlement of Brittany sheltered in the castle three times — in 1564, 1582 and 1583 — during the plague epidemics at Rennes.

Under the Rieux and Coligny families, owners between 1547 and 1605, Vitré housed Protestant worship and became for some years a Huguenot bastion. In 1589 the fortress held out against a five-month siege by Philippe Emmanuel, duc de Mercœur. In 1605, after the death of Guy XX de Laval, the castle became the property of the La Trémoille family, of Poitou.

The castle was abandoned in the seventeenth century and decayed slowly. In 1795 an accidental fire destroyed the seigneurial lodging, one of the major events of the Revolution at Vitré. Early in the nineteenth century a departmental prison was built in the lodging's place, taking up the whole northern side of the castle including the Madeleine tower; it became a barracks with the arrival of the 70th infantry regiment. The Saint-Laurent tower fell in 1835 and was rebuilt around 1870.

The castle was bought in 1820 for 8,500 francs. In 1872 it was among the first castles in France to be classified a historical monument, and it was restored from 1875 under the architect Denis Darcy. A small museum was installed in 1876 at the prompting of the historian Arthur de La Borderie — who, as the town's conservator, had the collegiate church of the Madeleine on the forecourt pulled down and a boys' school built in its place. Further parts of the castle were classified in 1898 and 1902. Vitré's town hall now occupies a building inside the walls, reconstructed in 1912 to the plans of the medieval lodging, and the museum holds paintings of the town's history, sculpture from its houses and the tomb of Guy X de Laval; restoration of the Renaissance apse-let was completed in 2012.