Photo : Selbymay / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)
Château des ducs de La Trémoille
As early as the 8th century a fortress stood on the steep rock at Thouars, in the Deux-Sèvres, enclosed by a meander of the Thouet and well suited to defence. It was taken and razed in 762 by Pepin the Short, accompanied by his son Charles, the future Charlemagne. Later a stronghold, Thouars played an important part in the wars between the kings of France and England, from Henry Plantagenet and Philip Augustus to the end of the Hundred Years' War.
In 1619 Henry de La Trémoille married his cousin Marie de La Tour d'Auvergne, sister of Turenne. To rework the ducal castle, she had a first pavilion built from 1635, then decided to raze the old castle to build a grander one. The whole is sumptuous and very large. The architect was Jacques Lemercier, famous for his work at the Louvre and the Sorbonne church in Paris and for building the Château de Richelieu. Damaged in 1789, it became a barracks, a private school and then a prison, and since 1933 it has housed a state secondary school.
