France · Restored
Fort de Joux
Fort de Joux (Château de Joux) is a medieval castle later transformed into a fort, perched above the Cluse de Pontarlier in the Jura Mountains of France. It developed from an 11th-century keep into a bastioned fortress and served as a prison and military post; it now houses a museum of arms and is a listed monument historique.
Its prime
1693
Today
Restored
As it stood in 1693
What Fort de Joux looked like in its prime.
Perched on limestone ridges above a narrow mountain pass, the complex reads as two linked fortified masses: a broad plateaulike citadel with layered stone curtain walls, terraced glacis and long low barracks capped by steep red-tiled roofs, and a separate rocky outcrop fort with rounded masonry bastions and earth-covered ramparts. A tall rectangular stone keep with a steep pyramidal red tile roof dominates the courtyard range; ashlar masonry is pale local limestone. At prime the roofs, parapets and earthworks are intact and continuous.
Its story
The story of Fort de Joux.
The Toll in the Cluse
The road through the cluse of Pontarlier was one of only two routes fit for carts between the county of Burgundy and Switzerland and Lombardy beyond — the salt road and the via Francigena in one. A toll stood there in antiquity, with a wooden watch on the Rochette plateau above; the high mountain held by fifty men that Caesar describes as the way into the Sequani country may have been this post.
The house of Joux appears in the tenth century, and the toll paid for stone. Its lords took a due from the carts, held a salt pan at Salins-les-Bains, iron and silver mines and glassworks, and spread their fief until they styled themselves the banner lords of the Jura. The castle is first named in 1039, in the Vita Mathildis, as Miroaltum; the earliest structure was of timber, and over the following century the lords rebuilt the keep and the outer defences in stone.
Noses and Ears, 1039
In 1039 Aldric de Joux and everyone else in the castle had their noses and ears cut off by Boniface III of Tuscany and his Lombard troops, as a reminder that they owed allegiance to the Holy Roman Emperor: they had fortified the place without permission. The lords took the imperial side ever after. Amaury III did homage to Frederick Barbarossa in 1168 and served him until 1183.
In 1246 Jean I de Chalon forced Amaury IV to terms with the barons-bourgeois of Pontarlier; in reprisal Amaury charged exorbitant tolls on those crossing his lands for salt at Salins, and the war that followed brought desolation on the lands of Joux. Henri II de Joux fought with the Ghibellines at the Sicilian Vespers in 1282, and Jean de Joux was killed with his squire at Mons-en-Pévèle, fighting Philip the Fair.
Philip the Good's Frontier Post, 1454
The fief passed by marriage into the houses of Blonay and then Vienne; Guillaume de Vienne, first knight of the Golden Fleece, bought it in 1410. His son, deep in debt, sold it in 1454 to Philip the Good of Burgundy, who turned it into a guarded frontier post — the work done by the men of Pontarlier and paid for by the fairs of Saint-Luc and Saint-Georges, created for the purpose.
In 1475 the castle held out against the Bernese, who had set out to sack Pontarlier, and in 1476 Katherin Bouchet covered Charles the Bold's retreats after Grandson and Morat; Mary of Burgundy made him castellan for life, and her marriage brought Joux under Maximilian. The Hochbergs, counts of Neuchâtel, pressed their claim through the courts and by seizure until the Parlement of Dole awarded the castle in 1492 to Margaret of Austria. Neuchâtel claimed Joux for three centuries more; François I arbitrated in 1529, and the quarrel closed only at the Congress of Vienna.
Three French Conquests, 1639-1674
The Ten Years' War reached the cluse in 1639: Pontarlier fell first, then the castle, taken by French troops under Bernard of Saxe-Weimar after fifteen days of open trenches. France refused to give it back at Westphalia and returned it only in November 1659, under the Treaty of the Pyrenees. Louis XIV came in person in 1668 to claim Franche-Comté as his wife's dowry and sent the marquis de Noisy against Joux; Baron Ferdinand de Saint-Mauris, with sixty soldiers, twenty horse and two hundred militia, capitulated quickly to a force half that size. Aix-la-Chapelle handed the province back to Spain; Louis returned in 1674, and the marquis de Duras paid the governor, who fled into Switzerland and left the fort to the French.
The Treaty of Nijmegen confirmed Franche-Comté as French in 1678 and dismembered the lordship of Joux. Vauban modernised the fort between 1678 and 1693, adding a fourth enceinte with a hornwork and two demi-bastions, deepening the ditches and building barracks. Joux was one of three Franc-Comtois forts Louis XIV spared when the province's other castles were razed.
A Prison of State, and the Austrians in 1814
Under Louis XV the fort housed mainly invalid and retired soldiers, and by the middle of the eighteenth century it had become a state prison, holding prisoners for successive governments into the nineteenth century. Mirabeau and Heinrich von Kleist were confined there, and so was Toussaint Louverture, the leader of the Haitian Revolution, who died in the fort on 7 April 1803.
The Austrians took the castle in 1814. The forts built at Larmont later in the century reinforced the position, and in 1879 Joseph Joffre, then an engineering officer and later a Marshal of France, modernised the works; the fort was counted among the Maginot Line defences meant to block a German advance through Swiss territory. It served in the defence of the region until the First World War.
Step inside
10 places to explore in 1693.
The record describes 10 distinct spots at Fort de Joux, including 4 interiors: main keep and inner courtyard, the deep well shaft, prison cells in the keep and more. Create your own photoreal reconstruction and explore every one, more scenes means more rooms, more angles, and more of the place to stand in.
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Recreate Fort de Joux with AI to explore it.
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Clans who held Fort de Joux.
The families that held Fort de Joux for a decade or more across its history, follow a name to its clan.
Joux
Seat of the lords of Joux, who rebuilt the 11th-century wooden castle in stone and held it until Philip the Good, Duke of Burgundy, bought it in 1454.
