Saint Malo Castle

Saint-Malo was lost by the Duke of Brittany to the King of France in 1395 and handed back in 1415 by Charles VI to his son-in-law, Duke John V, as the price of Breton support for the Agincourt campaign, in which the Bretons in the end took no part. In 1424 John V began the castle with the Grand Donjon on the isthmus that was then the only crossing between the walled town and the mainland, to hold the people of Saint-Malo in his subjection, replacing the Château Gaillard that Charles VI had begun in 1394 to guard the city on its seaward side. The new keep, built on a horseshoe plan, rested on a stretch of the fourteenth-century town wall, the Petit Donjon and the west curtain, and the castle stood detached from the ramparts.

In 1475 Francis II, Duke of Brittany, had the tower called La Générale raised at the south-west corner of the site, lower than the Grand Donjon but more massive. Under the Treaty of Verger of 1488 the duke acknowledged himself a vassal of the King of France and the place was left to the king as a guarantee.

Francis's daughter Anne, the future queen of France, had the Tour Quic-en-Groigne built at the north-west corner between 1498 and 1501, so named because it was said to have been raised against the will of the chapter and the burghers of Saint-Malo; it carried an inscription, effaced during the Revolution, reading Quic-en-Groigne, ainsi sera, c'est mon plaisir. Two more towers followed within a few years, the Tour des Dames at the north-east corner and the Tour des Moulins at the south-east: broad bastions pierced by a few gun ports and built to answer artillery. Of the towers, only the platform of the Tour des Dames was open to women.

In 1590 the townspeople stormed the castle to stop its governor delivering the town to the partisans of the Protestant Henry IV, and the governor was killed in the rising. The quarrel was settled when Henry IV converted to Catholicism four years later.

In the seventeenth century the bastion de la Galère, a triangular work shaped like a ship's prow, was added at the north-east corner. Under Louis XIV, Vauban had the curtains and the upper storeys of the towers altered from 1690 by the Parisian engineer Siméon Garangeau so that guns could be mounted on them, and two barrack blocks of the early eighteenth century were built along the north and east sides of the central courtyard. In 1765 Louis XV had La Chalotais, procureur général of the Parlement of Brittany, shut up in the castle.

During the Revolution the curtain linking the Tour Quic-en-Groigne to La Générale was taken down, and in 1792 the people of Saint-Malo stormed the castle a second time. In the nineteenth century it became a barracks and remained one until 1921, when the town council bought the buildings and put the former barracks to use for public administration. The castle had been classified a monument historique in July 1886, with further classifications in 1913 and 1921. A museum was installed in 1927.

During the Second World War the château was bombarded for two days by American artillery and aircraft in the Battle of Saint-Malo. Troops of the American 330th Infantry Regiment liberated the walled city on the morning of 14 August 1944; the 150 German soldiers holding the château did not surrender until late that afternoon.

After the war the town council under its mayor, Guy La Chambre, set in hand the restoration of the Grand Donjon, badly damaged in the fighting. The barrack blocks were converted for municipal use as the Hôtel de Ville, and carved panelling of the late seventeenth century, salvaged from the Hôtel Marion du Fresne which had been destroyed in the fighting, was installed in the mayor's parlour in 1952. The Musée d'Histoire de la Ville et du Pays Malouin occupied much of the Grand Donjon and La Générale from the late 1940s. The museum closed in November 2019.