The If Castle

Just over a kilometre off the coast of Marseille, a stark white fortress rises from a small limestone island in the turquoise waters of the Bay of Marseille. The Château d'If is one of the most instantly recognizable silhouettes in southern France, immortalized by Alexandre Dumas as the inescapable prison from which Edmond Dantès, the future Count of Monte Cristo, accomplished one of literature's most celebrated escapes. Yet long before Dumas put pen to paper, the real Château d'If had already accumulated three centuries of history as fortress, prison, and silent witness to some of the most turbulent periods of the French state.

The island of If sits at the western entrance to the harbour of Marseille, in the Frioul archipelago, and the castle commands a strategic position over the sea lanes leading into one of the Mediterranean's busiest ports. Its name comes from the Old French word for the yew tree, ifs, which once grew on the otherwise barren rock. Today, the fortress is one of the most visited monuments in Marseille, drawing roughly a hundred thousand travellers each year and reachable only by a brief ferry ride from the Vieux Port.

A Royal Fortress on a Bare RockThe story of the Château d'If begins in 1516, when the young King François I stopped in Marseille on his way back from his celebrated victory at Marignano. Strolling around the harbour, he became aware of the small island of If, then notable mainly as a curious rest stop for an unlikely traveller: a rhinoceros sent the same year as a gift from King Manuel I of Portugal to Pope Leo X, which had paused in the bay during its sea voyage to Rome. François took the diplomatic opportunity to visit the rhinoceros and, more importantly, to study the strategic geography of the islet itself.

That assessment turned to urgent action eight years later, when the armies of the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V besieged Marseille in 1524 and exposed the city's lack of seaward defences. François I ordered the construction of a stone fortress, and work began the following year. By 1531, the Château d'If was complete: a square keep roughly twenty-eight metres on each side, flanked by three cylindrical towers known as Saint-Christophe, Saint-Jaume, and Maugouvert, each pierced with the gun ports of an artillery age that had only just begun.

The new fortress was put to the test almost immediately. In 1536, Charles V again attempted to take Marseille, this time approaching by sea. The Château d'If performed precisely as François had imagined: its mere presence and the bristle of its cannon discouraged the maritime assault, and the imperial troops were forced to abandon their plan. Marseille, suspicious of any structure that empowered royal authority over their famously independent city, called the new castle La Malvoisine, the Bad Neighbour.

From Fortress to PrisonThe Bad Neighbour soon assumed a darker reputation. By 1540, just nine years after its completion, the Château d'If had begun to accept its first prisoners. The combination of its fortified bulk, its position more than a kilometre offshore, and the powerful currents of the bay, which made the swim to Marseille treacherous even for the strongest swimmers, made it an ideal destination for political and religious detainees whom the crown wished to render permanently unreachable. Locals would soon describe it as Marseille's answer to Alcatraz, four centuries ahead of the American original.

Conditions inside the castle were stratified by class, and the contrast between them is one of the most affecting features of any modern visit. The wealthy were locked into the upper floor in private cells called pistoles, sometimes equipped with fireplaces and small windows. Common prisoners shared the ground-floor rooms, dimly lit and overcrowded but at least supplied with a courtyard cistern. Deepest of all, however, were the windowless dungeons beneath the castle, filthy with damp and vermin; few prisoners survived more than a few weeks in those subterranean cells, and the overall life expectancy in the prison was estimated at just nine months.

Across nearly four centuries, the Château d'If absorbed a steady traffic of historical figures. More than three thousand five hundred Huguenot Protestants were incarcerated here following the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685. The Comte de Mirabeau, future leader of the French Revolution, spent several months in a relatively comfortable cell in the 1770s after his father obtained a lettre de cachet to discipline his libertine behaviour. Jean-Baptiste Chataud, the captain of the merchant ship Grand Saint-Antoine that brought the catastrophic plague of 1720 to Marseille, was held within these walls. Revolutionaries from the uprisings of 1848 and the Paris Commune of 1871 carved their initials and political slogans into the stones of the courtyard, where many of these inscriptions remain visible today. The body of General Kléber, killed in Cairo during the Napoleonic campaigns in Egypt, was preserved at the Château d'If for eighteen years before its eventual return to Strasbourg.

The Count of Monte CristoFor all its real history, the Château d'If owes its global fame to a single book. In 1844, Alexandre Dumas published The Count of Monte Cristo as a serial in the newspaper Journal des débats, recounting the story of Edmond Dantès, a promising young Marseille sailor who is wrongly imprisoned in the Château d'If as a Bonapartist conspirator. After fourteen years of confinement and the chance friendship of his fellow prisoner Abbé Faria, Dantès stages an audacious escape, recovers the buried treasure of Monte Cristo, and returns to ruin the men who betrayed him. The novel's first chapters, set entirely within the cells of the Château d'If, made the fortress synonymous with unjust imprisonment in the imagination of the entire Western world.

Today, visitors are shown the cells popularly identified as those of Dantès and Faria, with a small fissure in the wall between them suggesting the tunnel through which the two prisoners are said to have communicated. Whether or not historical figures ever inspired Dumas's characters remains delightfully uncertain, but the staging of the cells has been part of the visit since the castle opened to the public, and even Mark Twain, who toured the Château d'If in 1867, recorded his fascination with the chambers in The Innocents Abroad.

Closing the Prison and Welcoming VisitorsThe Château d'If ceased operating as a prison toward the end of the nineteenth century, and on September 23, 1890, it was demilitarized and opened to the public for the first time. The fortress was classified as a monument historique by the French Ministry of Culture in 1926. During the Second World War, German occupying forces briefly used the castle, but no major changes have altered its essential character since the late nineteenth-century restoration.

A visit today begins with the short ferry crossing from the Vieux Port, a journey of roughly twenty minutes that affords spectacular views of Marseille's harbour, Notre-Dame de la Garde on its hilltop, and the dramatic limestone cliffs of the Frioul archipelago. The visit lasts approximately an hour and includes the inner courtyard, the chapel, the recreated cells of Edmond Dantès and Abbé Faria, the kitchen, and the upper terraces, where the panoramic views of Marseille and the open sea remind every visitor of just how far Edmond would have had to swim. For travellers in pursuit of literature made tangible, of French history written in stone and seawater, the Château d'If remains one of the indispensable destinations of the Mediterranean coast.