Citadelle de Marseille (Fort Saint-Nicolas)

This guide to the Citadelle de Marseille (Fort Saint-Nicolas) follows the military engineer Vauban's furious 1679 inspection of a fort barely fifteen years old, ordered by a king seeking a second opinion on the work of engineer Nicolas Desjardins. It traces the citadel's real purpose in the years after Marseille's own revolt against Louis XIV. The fort later served as a barracks, then a military prison holding resistance fighters during the Second World War.