During the First World War, the village housed a military detention camp called the Dépôt de Triage.

Among others, the American poet E. E. Cummings and his friend William Slater Brown, then volunteers in the Norton-Harjes Ambulance Corps in France, were held there between September 21, 1917, and December 19 of the same year, on charges of "espionage".

It served as a link to the fortified belt protecting the Duchy of Normandy from the potential conquest of its powerful neighbours, the King of France and the Duke of Anjou.

In 1386, a criminal trial in Falaise sentenced to death a pig who had eaten the infant of the mason Souvet in the village.

Ferté-Macé survived until the 18th century as a small town of around one thousand inhabitants, living in handicrafts and local trade.