Château d'If

Francis I landed on the islet of If in January 1516, drawn from a pilgrimage at Saint-Maximin-la-Sainte-Baume by the Indian rhinoceros a Portuguese ship was carrying from Lisbon to Pope Leo X. The rock was then uninhabited, given over to grazing goats, and it was on that journey that the king saw how poorly the Marseille coast was defended.

The château was the first royal fortress of Marseille, begun after the Spanish siege of the city in September 1524. The work is dated 1524–1531 by some accounts; others have it begun only in mid-April 1529, delayed by bad weather, with no known completion date and the first garrison and governor in place by 1531. Among the materials were stones from Marseille buildings destroyed in the 1524 siege.

The fort's principal military value was as a deterrent: it never had to fight off an attack, and the closest it came to a test was in July 1531, when the Emperor Charles V prepared to attack Marseille and then abandoned the plan. Its Saint-Jaume and Maugovert towers faced the city, to protect it but also to watch it and control its shipping. The Marseillais, jealous of their inherited autonomy, saw in this the crown's first military attempt to impose itself in Provence, and called the fortress la Malvoisine.

In 1591 Charles de Casaulx refused to recognise the Protestant Henri IV and tried to make Marseille an independent Catholic republic; the château's governor, the comte Nicolas de Beausset, called in Florentine troops, who built the bastioned outer enceinte between 1591 and 1598, shortly before the Peace of Vervins returned the place to France.

Charged with modernising the fort, Vauban delivered a report on 11 April 1701 that spared only the original château; the fortifications, he wrote, were rendered "very roughly and carelessly". He proposed a fourth tower facing the sea, had low coastal batteries laid out to fire along the waterline, and, considering the soldiers very badly lodged, built a guardhouse outside the gate later called the caserne Vauban.

The fortress had held prisoners since November 1540, when two Marseille fishermen became the first. Treatment followed wealth: the poorest, the pailleux, slept on straw in crowded ground-floor cells where filth left them a life expectancy of about nine months, while pistoliers paid for a first-floor room usually with a window, furniture and a fireplace.

A plaque put up at the château in 1953 commemorates 3,500 Protestants said to have been condemned to the galleys, often repeated since as a count of prisoners here; the plaque itself says only several were held in the fortress, the rest in other Marseille forts. Ruth Whelan's study identifies 27 prisoners held at If for religion between 1696 and 1716, among them nine camisards taken in the War of the Cévennes from 1702 and five men arrested while trying to emigrate rather than abjure. Some were moved out to the island from the port prisons to limit their religious influence on other convicts.

A hundred and twenty people were imprisoned after the rising of June 1848; to give them an outlet and keep tension from turning to mutiny, the prefect granted their request to carve the courtyard walls and supplied the tools, and the ninety-six inscriptions of the resulting frieze made the central court a memorial to the defeated. Gaston Crémieux, a leader of the Paris Commune, was shot here in 1871, and the last prisoners, Alsatian and Lorrainer civilians, were released in September 1914.

Alexandre Dumas visited the fortress on 10 December 1834, and in 1844 published The Count of Monte Cristo, in which Edmond Dantès and the abbé Faria are imprisoned on the island. The cells shown as those of Dantès and Faria were in all likelihood staged by nineteenth-century soldiers for the readers who began arriving from about 1850. No one is known to have escaped the island and survived, and though a sign marks a cell as that of the Man in the Iron Mask, he was never held here.

The prison closed at the end of the nineteenth century, and the château was demilitarised and opened to the public on 23 September 1890. It and the escarp wall around the islet were classified as monuments historiques on 7 July 1926. The Army handed the site to the Ministry of Culture in 1970 and management passed in 1994 to the Centre des monuments nationaux, which opens and maintains it; the islet has belonged to the Calanques National Park since 2012. It is the most visited paying monument in Marseille, with some 100,000 visitors a year.