The Fortified Castle of Guise: A Thousand Years of Military Architecture
Site at a Glance
- Rating
- 4.4
- Popularity
- Low
- Country
- France
- Primary era
- Medieval
- Eras represented
- Medieval, Early Modern
- Civilizations
- French
- Site type
- Military
- Remains
- Castle
On this page17 sections
History
The fortified castle of Guise in France is a medieval fortress whose history reaches back to the tenth century and whose successive rebuilding illustrates roughly a thousand years of military use. A family of Guise, vassals of the counts of Vermandois, appears in records from 945, while the castle itself is attested by the end of the tenth century. Tradition places the construction of its keep between 951 and 1056.
Medieval foundation and royal fortress
The earliest stronghold was a wooden motte-and-bailey, a fortified settlement built around a mound and an adjoining enclosed yard. During the twelfth century, it was rebuilt in local stone, and the castle expanded repeatedly between the twelfth and sixteenth centuries. The lordship passed by marriage to the Avesnes family during the twelfth century.
In 1177, the counts of Flanders and Hainaut captured Guise after a siege and badly damaged its defenses. The peace of 1185 brought the lordship into the royal sphere, and Guise became a royal fortress. Philip Augustus, King Philip II of France, ordered its reconstruction and appointed Guy de Tupigny governor in 1186. In 1223 and 1224, the keep was either constructed or restored, while the towers and curtain walls were raised or rebuilt.
Jean of Hainaut, an English supporter, besieged the castle in 1340 but withdrew. During the Hundred Years’ War, the fortress sheltered people fleeing repeated English raids. Guise passed to the Anjou family in 1360. In 1424, Jean Poton de Xaintrailles and La Hire, companions of Joan of Arc, took refuge there with other survivors of resistance to the English. Jean of Luxembourg seized the fortress in 1425 and became lord of Guise. Restoration and rebuilding followed from 1431 to 1440, financed in part by the ransom for Joan of Arc paid by the English to Jean of Luxembourg.
Expansion and the bastioned citadel
Works begun by Charles of Anjou in 1443 continued from 1457 to 1463 under Quenin Aguechiel, the count of Guise’s master of works. The county passed to Claude of Lorraine in 1510. In 1536, troops of Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor, under the prince of Nassau occupied the fortress after its surrender, but French forces retook it later that year.
From January 1538, Jean de Renaud, known as Saint Remy, transformed the medieval castle into a modern bastioned citadel in collaboration with the Italian engineer Bellarmato. A bastion is a projecting defense that allows fire along adjoining walls. The work was among the earliest applications of this system in France. The first two bastions were Alouette and Charbonnière, and Jean de Renaud also installed a substantial countermining gallery, an underground passage used to detect or intercept enemy tunnels.
Wars of Religion and royal control
Duke Francis of Lorraine, Duke of Guise, helped save the French armies of Henry II in 1557, before the Treaty of Cateau-Cambrésis. He was assassinated at Orléans in 1563 by the Protestant Poltrot de Méré. During the Wars of Religion, a series of conflicts intensified by disputes between Catholics and Protestants, the Guise family strongly opposed the Reformation. King Henry IV besieged Guise in 1594, after which Duke Charles submitted to royal authority.
The castle was besieged again in 1635, when Guise lay near the frontier with the Spanish Netherlands. It was confiscated from Henry II of Lorraine in 1641 and again in 1650 during the Fronde, a series of rebellions against the regency and the young Louis XIV between 1648 and 1653. Guise remained loyal to Louis XIV, prompting another Spanish siege supported by the faction of the Princes. The castle then became a royal fortress, and Vauban, the leading French military engineer of Louis XIV’s reign, ordered works carried out by the military engineer Rivière.
In 1689, Du Fay de La Taillée, a Protestant woman from Échiré, was imprisoned at the castle for religious reasons and expelled from France in 1697. In 1767, the keep was returned to Louis-Joseph de Bourbon, prince of Condé.
War, decline, and preservation
During the First World War, the Oise and the fortress temporarily obstructed German offensives in 1914. Fierce fighting took place between German forces and French troops commanded by General Lanrezac. When French forces retook the town in 1918, artillery heavily shelled the castle. The keep and fortified circuit were the principal elements that remained.
The keep was classified as a historic monument by an order of 22 July 1924. In 1923, the Ministry of War had decided to sell the castle, which was subsequently used as a quarry and public dump. Collapses, water infiltration, and further deterioration followed. The municipality planned an initial phase of destruction in 1931, and residents living below the ramparts were evacuated in 1953 because of the danger of collapse.
A ministerial order then provided a subsidy for renovation, and a first historical museum opened in a restored part of the castle in 1956. A dangerous 150-metre section of rampart was demolished in 1957. Madame Sonnet and her children transferred the castle to the city of Guise on 6 August 1965. André Malraux had awarded the first prize in the “Masterpieces in Danger” competition to Maurice Duton and the Club du Vieux Manoir in 1963 for their rehabilitation work. An agreement signed in 1968 between the club and the municipality secured the continuation of restoration.
Since 1952, the Club du Vieux Manoir has carried out restoration through youth work projects and managed maintenance, public access, and activities at the site. The city of Guise owns the castle and entrusts these functions to the club. A ministerial order of 31 July 2008 classified the entire fortified castle, including its walls, glacis, bastions, gates, guardhouse, parts of the Governor’s Palace, prisoners’ lodging, Arsenal, the foundations of the former collegiate church, underground spaces, and archaeological soils.
Remains
The ruins occupy a rocky spur above the Oise valley, on high ground along the river’s west bank in the Thiérache region. The medieval castle covered essentially the same area as the present complex. Its later defenses surround the medieval core, combining massive masonry, towers, bastions, gates, earthworks, underground passages, and surviving archaeological remains.
Medieval castle
The keep
The keep, the principal fortified tower of a medieval castle, now stands 24 metres high and has a circumference of 55 metres. Built from Ardennes sandstone, its walls are 5.75 metres thick. The three-storey structure has a blind lower room that served as a granary during the Middle Ages. The two upper levels combined living and defensive functions, with a fireplace and numerous loopholes on each floor.
Ribbed cross-vaults covered the upper floors, and one vault remains in place. In the sixteenth century, the keep received a conical, pepper-pot-shaped roof 22.50 metres high. A seigneurial residence was added at its foot from the twelfth century.
Church and medieval enclosure
A chapel contemporary with the keep developed into the collegiate church of Saint-Gervais and Saint-Protais. A collegiate church is served by a chapter of clergy known as canons rather than by a monastic community. A chapter was established there in 1052. Rebuilt and enlarged several times, the church could accommodate more than 300 people in the sixteenth century. A cemetery and the canons’ cloister surrounded it.
The church was demolished at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Emergency excavations by the Club du Vieux Manoir later uncovered its remains and reconstructed its ground plan. The medieval enclosure consisted of high curtain walls linked by circular towers, three of which retain visible remains. It also contained a very large barn and numerous stone buildings, whose structures were later reused as cellars beneath sixteenth-century buildings.
Gates and drawbridges
The gates included three turning drawbridges described by Froissart. The positions of two survive, one operated by chains and the other by counterweights. The fortified complex includes the Ducal Gate and the Paris Gate, while a monumental entrance built on medieval masonry provided access to the different areas of the fortress.
Sixteenth-century defenses
Bastions and outer works
The sixteenth-century fortress surrounds the medieval castle and replaces or incorporates former feudal towers with rounded or shielded bastion projections for flanking the ramparts. The fortified circuit includes the bastions of Alouette, Charbonnière, Moineau, and Haute Ville, together with an earthen crescent-shaped outwork and a raised crescent-shaped outwork.
An advanced bastioned section defended the western and southern ramparts and protected the entrance and sally gates. It contained two casemates, or protected chambers within a fortification, measuring 12 by 7 metres. Its ramparts reached at least 48.50 metres in height, while some walls were several tens of metres thick. A listening and countermining gallery ran at the foot of the curtain walls within the masonry.
Southern and entrance bastions
Another bastion, built in 1540 in the same style, contained a casemate capable of accommodating 40 men. It protected the southern rampart and the sally gate. An open bastion constructed on Claude of Lorraine’s initiative protected the fortress entrance and contained a double-chambered escarp gallery 110 metres long.
Arsenal and underground spaces
The Arsenal
The Arsenal was a large building eight storeys high, five of them beneath the roof. It was heavily damaged during the First World War. In peacetime it served as an arsenal and during wartime as a barracks. Its former ground floor, later converted into a storeroom, contains two vaulted rooms measuring 52.70 by 10.70 metres.
Subterranean defenses
Some underground spaces predate the sixteenth century and have brick vaults. Each bastion had escarp galleries and underground passages for countermining, much of which remains filled in. The protected archaeological area includes these subterranean spaces and the archaeological soils of the castle.
Later military alterations
Vauban made relatively minor alterations and repairs to the sixteenth-century fortress, but his work had a stronger effect through extensive earthworks, particularly in the outer defenses. In 1673, he judged the fortress “exceptional.” Its surviving fabric remains in ruins, with the keep, fortified circuit, defensive works, and buried archaeological structures preserving the long sequence of medieval and early modern fortification.
