Louis XI’s castle

The full story

After the death of Charles the Bold, royal troops led by Charles d’Amboise invaded the duchy. On 5 June 1477, through his governor, Louis XI told the mayor of Dijon, Étienne Barbisey, that he wanted to build a castle in the town, as he did at Auxonne and Beaune. To pay for it, a tax was levied on every “hearth”, meaning every household, in the province: in April 1478, revolts broke out in the Auxois, the Beaunois and the Châtillonnais.

Work, whose masonry the sources attribute to Jehan Nourissier, went slowly. The Saint-Bénigne and Notre-Dame towers were finished in 1481, but Louis XI died in 1483 without seeing the fortress completed. The fortified entrance on the town side, the gatehouse, was ready in 1487, then plague halted work in 1494. Only in the early 16th century, under Louis XII, were the governor’s lodging, a chapel, a postern gate and a great horseshoe-shaped bulwark facing the countryside added. Designed for the age of the cannon, the fortress was threaded with hidden galleries: soldiers could move unseen, fire into the ditch and be warned if the enemy dug a mine, a tunnel under the walls.

Spared during the siege of 1513, the castle soon became outdated. During the Wars of Religion, supporters of the Catholic League who had holed up inside surrendered to Marshal de Biron on 28 May 1595. In 1620, the towers were lowered by one storey to carry cannon platforms. Its last military episode came during the Fronde, when supporters of the Great Condé occupied it.

In 1789, the town asked the king to hand the castle over, then, a year later, to destroy it. During the Revolution it held political prisoners before becoming a barracks, the “gendarmes’ castle”. In 1876, the architect Charles Suisse, who had drawn up a restoration project, secured its listing as a historic monument, but the building stood in the way of the planned Boulevard de Brosses: delisted in 1887, it was razed. Allowed to visit it in June 1890, the Commission des Antiquités de la Côte-d’Or saved only two fragments of pinnacles, some crossbow bolts, two lead roof finials and the counterweights of the well.

To picture it today, you have to visit the museums. The Musée des Beaux-Arts holds three paintings made in 1861 by Pierre-Alexandre Jeanniot, showing the Guillaume tower, the entrance and the postern gate, and the archaeological museum displays a few carved decorations, including a gargoyle. On the site itself, Rue du Château keeps its name, the post office stands where the gatehouse once was, and the plot of the Saint-Martin tower was set aside in 1896 for the Protestant church.