Mauléon

Mauléon grew beneath a castle in the bocage of western Poitou. Its old barony was raised to a duchy in 1736 and renamed Châtillon after its lord’s family. Under the name Châtillon-sur-Sèvre, the town became a centre of the royalist insurrection in the Vendée in 1793, when war swept through the hedged fields and villages of the region.