The Old Castle

Here you are in front of the Old Castle, the very heart of Laval’s history. This is where it all began, around the year 1020, when a lord named Guy de Dénéré built a motte-and-bailey fortress to control the crossing of the Mayenne. He chose a strategic spot: a rocky spur above the ancient ford that linked Le Mans to Brittany. In other words, Laval was born in the shadow of this stronghold. By the 13th century, the wooden palisades were gone, replaced by stone. The castle became an imposing fortress in what’s known as the “Philippian” style, named after King Philip Augustus, with solid walls and a massive cylindrical keep rising 34 meters high. If you look up, imagine it crowned with wooden hoardings, those defensive galleries from which soldiers could fire down on attackers. The beams used to build them have been dated to the 1220s, making this one of the oldest surviving defensive timber structures in France. But the castle wasn’t only about war. On the eastern side, a square tower housed a Romanesque chapel built in the 1150s, its decoration inspired by the Poitevin school. Then, in the 14th century, a residential wing softened the fortress’s austerity, and by the early 16th century the Renaissance had arrived in the courtyard: large windows in pale tuffeau stone, elegant openings, and a first pleasure gallery facing the river. That gallery was later replaced by the Château-Neuf, which you’ve already seen. The castle’s story changed dramatically during the Revolution, when it was turned into a prison — a role it kept until the early 20th century. Generations of inmates were confined here, and the site’s image was long tied to this function. In the 19th century, the courthouse moved into the Renaissance gallery, and by the 1920s the whole site had been repurposed as a museum. Today, the Old Castle houses MANAS, the Museum of Naïve and Singular Art, a nod to Laval’s own painter Henri Rousseau, known as “Le Douanier.” Visitors can explore both the art collections and the monument’s medieval heritage, and even climb to the top of the keep. From up there, the view over Laval is breathtaking — a thousand years of history beneath your eyes. Classified as a Historic Monument as early as 1840, the Old Castle was one of the very first monuments to be protected in France. And even now, it remains the great witness to the birth and evolution of Laval.