Château de Vincennes The Château de Vincennes is a massive 14th and 17th century French royal castle in the town of Vincennes , to the east of Paris , now a suburb of the metropolis . History . Like other more famous châteaux it had its origins in a hunting lodge , constructed for Louis VII about 1150 in the forest of Vincennes . In the 13th century , Philip Augustus and Louis IX erected a more substantial manor : Louis IX is reputed to have departed from Vincennes on the crusade from which he did not return . Vincennes was more than the grim fortress : Philippe III ( in 1274 ) and Philippe IV ( in 1284 ) were each married there and three 14th - century kings died at Vincennes : Louis X ( 1316 ) , Philippe V ( 1322 ) and Charles IV ( 1328 ) . To strengthen the site the castle was greatly enlarged replacing the earlier site in the later 14th century . A " donjon " tower , 52 meters high , the tallest medieval fortified structure of Europe , was added by Philip VI of France , a work that was started about 1337 . The grand rectangular circuit of walls , was completed by the Valois about two generations later ( ca . 1410 ) . The donjon served as a residence for the royal family , and its buildings are known to have once held the library and personal study of Charles V . Henry V of England died in the donjon in 1422 following the siege of Meaux . In the Château de Vincennes the relics of the Crown of Thorns were temporarily housed while the Sainte - Chapelle was being readied to receive them . A fragment that remained behind received its own chapel at Vincennes , probably built by Peter of Montereau ( the probable designer of the Sainte - Chapelle in Paris ) , which survives ( " illustration , below " ) . Henri IV spent a sojourn imprisoned at Vincennes during the Wars of Religion . In the 17th century the architect Louis Le Vau built for Louis XIV a pair of isolated ranges mirroring one another across a parterre to one side of the keep , suited for the Queen Mother and Cardinal Mazarin , but rebuilding was never pursued once Versailles occupied all attentions . Some splendid apartments show the earliest phase of Louis XIV style , before the example of Vaux - le - Vicomte presented the Sun King with a worthy model . The unlucky builder of Vaux , the minister Nicolas Fouquet found himself transferred to Vincennes , to much less comfortable lodgings . In 1691 another unwilling lodger was John Vanbrugh , soon to become a playwright and architect , who drew some of his Baroque " gothick " from his experience of Vincennes , it has been argued . Abandoned in the 18th century , the château still served , first as the site of the Vincennes porcelain manufactory , the precursor to Sèvres , then as a state prison , which housed the marquis de Sade , Diderot , Mirabeau , and the famous confidence man , Jean Henri Latude , as well as a community of nuns of the English Benedictine Congregation from Cambrai . At the end of February 1791 a mob of more than a thousand workers from the Faubourg Saint - Antoine , encouraged by members of the Cordeliers Club and led by Antoine Joseph Santerre , marched out to the Château , which , rumour had it , was being readied on the part of the Crown for political prisoners , and with crowbars and pickaxes set about demolishing it , as the Bastille had recently been demolished . The work was interrupted by the marquis de Lafayette who took several ringleaders prisoner , to the jeers of the Parisian workers . During the remainder of the Revolution it played no part . From 1796 it served as an arms factory , suiting it to its current occupants , the historical sections of the French Armed Services . General Daumesnil who lost a leg , which was replaced by a wooden prosthesis , at the battle of Wagram was assigned to the defense of the Château de Vincennes in 1812 . He faced down the allies of the Sixth Coalition marching on Paris in 1814 in the aftermath of the Battle of the Nations with the famous words " I shall surrender Vincennes when I get my leg back " ( " Je rendrai Vincennes quand on me rendra ma jambe " , with a polysemic pun in French that is lost in translation ) . The executions of the duc d ' Enghien , in 1804 , and Mata - Hari , in 1917 , were effected at the château . During the Nazi occupation , 30 hostages were murdered on August 20 , 1944 . The park was landscaped in the English landscape style in the 19th century . In 1860 Napoleon III , having employed Viollet - le - Duc to restore the keep and the chapel , gave the " Bois de Vincennes " ( 9 . 95 km² in extent ) and its château to Paris as a public park . Château de Vincennes also served as the military headquarters of the Chief of General Staff , General Maurice Gamelin during the unsuccessful defence of France against the invading German army in 1940 . It is now the main base of France ' s Defence Historical Service , which maintains a museum in the " donjon " . Description of the Château . Only traces remain of the earlier castle and the substantial remains date from the 14th century . The castle forms a rectangle whose perimeter is more than a kilometer in length ( 330 x 175m ) . The castle has six towers and three gates , each originally 13 meters high . The castle is surrounded by a deep stone lined moat . The keep , 52m high , and its enceinte occupy the western side of the fortress and are separated from the rest of the castle by the moat . The towers of the " grande enceinte " now stand only to the height of the walls , having been demolished in the 1800s , save the Tour du Village on the north side of the enclosure . The south end of the castle contains the buildings of Le Vau .