The keep's two histories
The Tour de Constance and Marie Durand
How Louis IX's crusader keep became a prison, and the thirty-eight years linked to one word on its well.
Check availability on Viator ↗A keep built for a new port
Louis IX raised the Tour de Constance between 1242 and 1254 as the strongpoint of the Mediterranean port he was founding on the marshes — a cylindrical keep with walls six metres thick at the base, standing apart from the later wall circuit.
From keep to prison
After 1685, when the revocation of the Edict of Nantes outlawed Protestant worship in France, the tower became a place to hold Protestant women who refused to renounce their faith.
Marie Durand, thirty-eight years
Marie Durand was imprisoned in the Tour de Constance from 1730 to 1768 — thirty-eight years — for exactly that refusal. The word REGISTER, meaning 'resist', is carved into the rim of the tower's well and is associated with her; visitors still look for it today.
What the tower shows now
Visitors climb the spiral staircase past the guardroom and the vaulted knights' hall to the terrace at the top, which gives a clear overview of the whole rampart circuit before setting off to walk it.