During a visit to Marseille in 1516, François Ier measures the strategic importance of the site and orders that a fortress is built there. Very quickly, the fortress changed its function and became a prison.

From the seventeenth century, the Protestants were thrown en masse into the dungeons. To the prisoners of mark, however, the fortress offers living conditions quite decent. The most famous prisoner is undoubtedly José Custodio Faria that Alexandre Dumas makes immortal with the Count of Monte Cristo. One can still see the hole dug in the wall of one of the cells by Edmond Dantes. After welcoming the insurgents of 1848 and the Communards of 1871, the fortress will lose its prison vocation and will be open to the public in 1890.