Fortress of Miolans

The spur above the Combe de Savoie was occupied long before any castle stood on it. Roman tiles and pottery have been found in the surrounding ground, and the Roman road running from Aosta to Lyon by way of Vienne and the Mont-Cenis passed close by, becoming a major line of communication in the early Middle Ages. The castle was raised on the remains of an oppidum or Roman fortress, probably of the fourth century, of which the lower part of the tour Saint-Pierre is reckoned to survive. From that height it commanded the chief roads of the western Alps towards Italy, the Maurienne route to the Mont-Cenis pass and the Tarentaise route to the Little St Bernard, and faced the castles of Aiton, Chamoux, l'Heuille, Châteauneuf and Montmayeur; against the counts' own strongholds of Montmélian and Charbonnières, though, its regional weight was a measured one. The name first appears as Miolano-Meiolanum on 21 February 1014, in the cartulary of the abbey of Saint-André-le-Bas at Vienne, recording a gift from King Rodolphe III to his wife Ermengarde, and a charter of 1081 mentions the castle chapel, which went on serving as the parish church into the eighteenth century.

The fortification seems to have been the work of the family of Miolans, from the eleventh century onward. Guifred and Nantelme appear as lords of Miolans in charters of 1081 and 1083, and by 1083 a small tower castle stood on the rocky promontory; a charter of 1090 calls one Anthelme de Miolans vir illustrissimus. After the Seyssel, theirs was among the most important houses of Savoie Propre, and its members were numerous in the entourage of the counts of Savoy through the medieval centuries. Baron Geoffroy de Miolans went with Count Amadeus III of Savoy on the Second Crusade in 1146, and was said to have brought back from Jerusalem three thorns from the crown of Christ, which he placed in the castle chapel; the relics were moved in 1381 to the convent of hermit friars of Saint Augustine newly founded by Jean de Miolans. In 1263 Anthelme de Miolans acknowledged that he held the castle and the land of Miolans in fief, with high, middle and low justice and other rights besides, from the new count Peter II of Savoy, and in 1360 another Anthelme was made castellan of the lands and castle by Count Amadeus VI.

From 1380 Jean de Miolans, husband of Agnès de Roussillon and counsellor to Count Amadeus VIII, had the castle remodelled, laying out a system of fortifications with a second keep and adding a third tower, called the Sauvegarde. Jacques II de Miolans was invested with the castle on 25 February 1421, and about 1475 the family bound itself to the powerful house of Montmayeur. By then the castle was the head of a castellany, or mandement, within the framework the counts of Savoy built up from the fourteenth century; until that point the lordship and its castle had depended on the castellany of Montmélian. The accounts of Roland de La Ravoire, receiver of the dues and revenues of the valley of Miolans for 1452 to 1457, survive in the departmental archives, and half a century after him the damoiseau Guy de La Compôte held the castellany on behalf of Louis de Miolans, to whom he was said to be both kinsman and representative. The lordship was raised into a barony in 1497, in favour of the marshal Louis de Miolans.

The duke of Savoy had not missed the strategic value of the place. By an act of 1513 he is said to have opposed the fortifying of the castle, and to have required in exchange that it should fall into the ducal domain if the Miolans were left without a male heir. The marshal appears to have anticipated the condition a year earlier by instituting a chain of successive heirs: his son Jacques III first, then the eldest son of his eldest daughter, then that of his second daughter, and a second son if need be. Failing male heirs altogether, he named his daughter Claudine. In 1523 Jacques III, the last male of the family, died in Italy.

Claudine de Miolans thus became the family's last heiress. She was promised to Guillaume de Poitiers, count of Saint-Vallier and lord of Sérignan, brother of Diane de Poitiers; but as a stranger to Savoy he needed the duke's authorisation, and the duke had no wish to see the fortress pass into the hands of a French lord. On 21 to 25 November 1523 he obtained a transaction from the lady of Miolans by which she gave up all her goods and rights lying between the mandements of Montmélian and Tournon in return for compensation, and other suitors, born in the duchy, were put before her. After much negotiation, and in the face of Claudine's determination to marry Guillaume de Poitiers, the duke consented to the match, having already had the whole of the family's property seized in Savoy and in Piedmont.

He took formal possession of the lordship and castle on 23 December 1523, fortified it, and turned the old strong house into a fortress proper. Urbain Mallet received the keys as its new keeper the same year. Jean de Vulpillière became the first governor of the stronghold on 8 May 1529, and on that same day Guillaume de Poitiers was invested as lord of Miolans, against the terms of the earlier settlement with Claudine. In 1536 King Francis I of France invaded the duchy of Savoy and the castle was occupied; a garrison was quartered in it from 1536 until 19 September 1559, when Francis II restored the place to his uncle Emmanuel Philibert, duke of Savoy. The keeper Urbain d'Arvillard raised difficulties over giving it up, and the duke had to furnish himself with a letter dated 19 September 1559 before the castle returned to the ducal domain. François-Annibal de Seyssel was its governor in 1599. Nothing had been kept in repair through the years of occupation, and its use as a fortress was no longer possible.

In 1564 Duke Emmanuel Philibert turned the castle into a state prison, and it remained one until 1792, acquiring the name of the Savoyard Bastille and a notoriety that invited comparison with the Bastille in Paris. Much of what is known of how it worked comes from the reports and accounts that have survived. The prison was in the charge of a captain-concierge, later titled governor, and twenty-eight of them followed one another down to 1792, only two of whom were not Savoyards by origin; Antoine Bergier held the post as captain and concierge in 1575, while a study of the prison published in 1879 put Jean de Vulpillière there in 1529. More than 200 prisoners are said to have passed through, most of them people inconvenient to the government, committed by lettre de cachet without ever coming before a court, some without term and some for life. A few were held in secret and known only by the name of the cell they occupied. Common criminals were confined there as well, and the place could serve as a house of correction for young aristocrats. A description drawn up in 1765 by the governor Louis de Launay sets out twelve compartments between the keep and the tour Saint-Pierre, the cells bearing the names Hell, Purgatory, Treasury, Hope and Little Hope, Paradise and Little Paradise, Second Corridor and First Corridor or Charcoal; the tour Saint-Pierre held three gaols one above another.

Father Monod, arrested on Richelieu's orders, ended his life in the fortress. The historian Pietro Giannone was held from 1736, and Vincent-René Lavini, an abbé who forged banknotes, from 1767 to 1786. François-Marie de l'Allée, baron de Songy, arrived in February 1772, and the Marquis de Sade on 8 December 1772; the pair of them got out. Sade had asked that he and his companions be allowed to dine in a room within the main dining area, next to one whose windows were unbarred, and on the night of 30 April, dated 1772 by some accounts and 1773 by others, they went out through those windows while the guards were at their own supper, Sade's valet Latour with them. Latour was told to leave a candle burning in Sade's room and a note on the table for the keepers. It was hours before a guard and the prison commandant found it in the empty room. In it the Marquis praised the decency with which he had been treated and expressed the hope that his guards would not be held to account for the escape; by then it was far too late to raise a search party.

The prison years were not peaceful ones. In the Franco-Savoyard conflict of 1600 to 1601 Lesdiguières took the stronghold, and Catinat besieged it again in 1690 and 1691. When the duchy of Savoy was invaded in 1792 the place was judged a local bastille and largely destroyed: on 22 September 1792 its towers were dismantled, the roofs burnt and the ditches filled in, and the seven prisoners still held were set free. Put up for auction as national property in 1794, it found no buyer in its unusable condition, and fell little by little into ruin.

The rights over the barony were held, down to the Revolution, by the family of Miolans. In 1616 Gabriel de Gadagne acknowledged holding them from Charles Emmanuel I of Savoy in the name of his son, Jean-François Mitte de Miolans, and in 1700 Charles-Emmanuel Miolans-Spinola did the same before Victor Amadeus II. The line did not run undisturbed: Melchior Mitte, ambassador of Louis XIII in 1629, had his rights over the barony confiscated by Duke Charles Emmanuel, who made them over to the marquis de Saluces-Cardé. At the Revolution, Marie-Anne Mitte de Chevrières, wife of Charles-Auguste de la Viciville, count of Vienne, and her son Charles-Louis Joseph tried to recover the rights and did not succeed. The matter was settled only on 8 germinal year V, 28 March 1797, in favour of Marie-Thérèse Saluces-Spinola-Garrès-Cardé, baroness of Miolans and widow of the marquis de Saint-Germain. Justice in the lordship itself was administered by Georges Paernat, advocate at the Senate of Savoy and lord of Verdun-Dessus and of the strong house of Saint-Vial, who sat as its ordinary judge.

The Sardinian restoration of 1815 did nothing for the ruins, which were left to themselves and worked as a quarry. In 1868 a dealer in building materials stripped them of their decorative elements, and in the same year the site passed to a former banker named Barjaud, who put one range of buildings back into order before selling it on to Sorbon of Chambéry, a glove maker, who sold it in turn to the Guiter family. Eugène Alexandre Guiter (1822–1872), prefect of Savoy, bought the fortress in August 1869 and set its restoration going.

The work was carried forward with the support of Jules Formigé (1879–1960), architect of historical monuments and member of the Institut, whose daughter married the prefect's grandson Jean-François-Eugène Guiter (1897–1959). Formigé drew up a plan of the whole site, called it the most perfect example of military art down to the end of the fifteenth century, and published an account of it in 1951 in the Mémoires of the Académie des sciences, belles-lettres et arts de Savoie.

The castle was classified as a historical monument by an order of 16 May 1944. It remains in private hands, with half of it open to visitors for part of the year, and between 1987 and 1989 it served as a location for scenes of the television series Guillaume Tell. Since 1997 it has been part of the Pierres-fortes de Savoie, a thematic heritage itinerary through the strongholds of the region.