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Heritage classified

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Origin and history

The Marguerite Tower, formerly known as the Febvre Tower or Grosse Tour, is the only surviving of the twelve towers and three fortified gates of the Argentan urban enclosure, built around 1360. This enclosure, destroyed under Louis XIII at the request of the local bourgeois, had protected the city since the 12th century, when Henry I Beauclerc built a powerful castle there. The tower, located northwest of the ramparts, marked a strategic point where the ditches were dry. Its typical 15th century architecture includes mâchicoulis on crows and a pepper roof, now restored after the damage suffered during the Battle of Normandy in 1944.

In the 17th century, the tower took the name of Marguerite, perhaps with reference to Marguerite de Lorraine or to an anonymous prisoner. Under Louis XIV, it housed young women accused of debauchery, then became a municipal depot in the 18th-18th centuries and a degreasing cell until the 1930s. Ranked a historic monument in 1965, it lost its roof during World War II, before being restored in the 1990s. Today owned by the municipality, it hosts exhibitions and bears witness to the defensive and judicial past of Argentan.

The tower, 17 meters high for 10 meters in diameter, consists of three floors served by a screw staircase. Its corbelling parapet, supported by crows with three ressaults, and its tile pyramidal roof (sommed once by a lead ear) illustrate medieval military techniques. The surrounding ditches, now closed, correspond to the current streets of the Republic, the Pottery and the Town Hall. This monument embodies both the Norman architectural heritage and the urban transformations of Argentan, from the wars of Religion to modernity.

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