Château de Pierrefonds

Château de Pierrefonds

A dream of the Middle Ages

Rising above a small town at the edge of a forest north of Paris, the Château de Pierrefonds looks like the perfect medieval castle: tall towers with pointed roofs, battlements, a drawbridge and statues of knights. And yet it is, in a sense, both very old and very new — a real medieval fortress that was brought back to life in the 1800s as a romantic vision of how a great castle might once have looked. The result is one of the most striking and dramatic castles in France.

The original fortress

A powerful castle was first built at Pierrefonds around 1400 for Louis of Orléans, the brother of the French king. It was a strong and important fortress in its day. But during a period of conflict in the 1600s, the castle was besieged, captured and then deliberately wrecked on royal orders, so that it could not be used against the crown. For nearly two hundred years it lay as a romantic ruin, slowly crumbling among the trees.

Viollet-le-Duc's masterpiece

In the 1800s, the ruined castle caught the imagination of Emperor Napoleon III, who loved the romance of the Middle Ages. He hired the famous architect Eugène Viollet-le-Duc — the same man who restored Carcassonne and Notre-Dame — to rebuild Pierrefonds.

Viollet-le-Duc did far more than simply repair the ruins. He used the old walls as a foundation and built upon them his own idea of a perfect medieval castle, complete with grand halls, painted decoration, soaring roofs and rows of statues. Some of his work was based on careful study of real medieval buildings, and some came from his own romantic imagination. The result is not exactly how the castle looked in the Middle Ages, but a glorious 19th-century dream of the medieval world.

A castle for stories

Because Pierrefonds looks so dramatically medieval, it has become a favourite location for films and television shows that need a fairy-tale castle. Most famously, it stood in for the legendary Camelot in a popular television series about the wizard Merlin and the young King Arthur. Visitors who recognise it from the screen enjoy walking through the very halls and courtyards they have seen in their favourite stories.

A teaching castle

Pierrefonds is also fascinating as a record of how people in the 1800s imagined the Middle Ages. Viollet-le-Duc filled it with details meant to show how a medieval castle worked and was decorated, so a visit is partly a lesson in medieval life and partly a window into the romantic dreams of the 19th century.

Visiting today

Visitors can explore Pierrefonds' great halls, climb its towers and walk its battlements, admiring both the medieval foundations and the rich 19th-century decoration. Models and displays explain the long story of its building, ruin and rebirth. Dramatic, romantic and straight out of a storybook, the Château de Pierrefonds is one of the most enchanting castles to visit anywhere near Paris.