Château de Vincennes

Historic · Vincennes (Val-de-Marne, eastern edge at the Bois de Vincennes)Paris,France

A royal palace built as a tower, six vaulted rooms stacked fifty metres high east of Paris, later a prison whose inmates carved the walls.

The Château de Vincennes is a royal palace in the shape of a tower: six storeys, with one great vaulted room on each floor. The keep has its own walled enclosure, and a second wall a kilometre round encloses that. The tower stands fifty metres high, counting the later work added on top, and no medieval keep left standing in Europe is taller. Charles V put it up in the 1360s in his family's hunting forest east of Paris, at a time when the city itself had become dangerous for kings. Inside, you can walk up through the rooms he lived in: the great chamber, the study off it where he kept his books, and a chapel the size of a cupboard cut into the wall. No other French royal keep can be climbed like that. From the seventeenth century the tower was used as a prison, and the men shut in it scratched their names and their calendars into the stone. That writing is still there. A separate chapel in the courtyard, begun to hold relics and finished nearly two centuries later, holds Renaissance glass.

Worth knowing

Good to know

Go in at the gate tower on the avenue side — That is the public entrance and the ticket office is underneath it. The far end of the enclosure, by the woods, is not a way in.
The keep is cold in every season — The walls are two metres thick and there is no heating, so from spring onwards the rooms stay well below the outside temperature.
The chapel and the keep are two separate visits — One ticket covers both buildings, so allow time for each. Many people leave without seeing the chapel, not realising it is included.
Morning is for the chapel glass — The Renaissance windows fill the east end, so the colour comes through strongest in the first half of the day.

Things to do

1
Climb the keep from the stores to the king's study
Start at the bottom and take the spiral stair one storey at a time. Each floor is a single room with one pillar in the middle, and the rooms get grander as you climb: stores at the bottom, then the guard room, then the king's chamber. Off that chamber, look for two small doors cut into the thickness of the wall. One opens into a study just big enough for a desk and a window, where Charles V kept his books; the other into a private chapel about the size of a wardrobe.
2
Read the prisoners' graffiti
On the upper floors, get close to the walls and look for cut lettering. You will find names, dates, coats of arms, and rows of scratched strokes counting off days. Some of it is careful and deep, worked over months. Find one with a year on it and work out how long ago that man was shut in the room.
3
Look east from the keep over the old hunting woods
From the terrace on top of the keep you look east over the Bois de Vincennes, the hunting woods that were the reason a king built here, with the edge of the city beyond them. Looking down, you see the whole walled enclosure laid out below you like a plan. Part of it is still army property and closed to visitors, and from up there you can see how large that part is.