The Navy Museum (Musée de la Marine) is closed for renovation - Reopening in November 2023.
The origin of the collections
The collections come from various sources, the first being the one given to King Louis XV by Henri Louis Duhamel du Monceau (inspector general of the Navy). Installed in the Louvre from 1752 to 1793 and then closed because of the Revolution.
In 1810, Napoleon 1st asked the engineer Jacques-Noël Sané to assemble models of ships to decorate the Cotelle gallery at the Grand Trianon (Versailles). This collection is known as the "Trianon collection".
Due to political and administrative vicissitudes, the naval collections were grouped together several times and then dispersed, by King Charles X, until the creation of a naval museum installed in the Louvre in 1827. Pierre Zédée also had a model building and restoration workshop set up within the museum.
The real beginning of the National Maritime Museum entrusted to the Ministry of the Navy
A decree signed by the President of the Republic on April 28, 1919, attached the Louvre Naval Museum to the Ministry of the Navy. From that moment on, the naval museum took the name, Musée de la Marine.
It benefited from the architectural program of the 1937 International Exhibition, which included the construction of the Palais de Chaillot, the Palais de Tokyo, and the Palais d'Iéna, which were intended to house several museums. The Musée de la Marine had to share the Passy wing of the Palais de Chaillot with the brand new Musée de l'Homme.
The collections of the Navy gradually moved to the Palais de Chaillot from 1939 onwards and the museum opened its doors in August 1943. Captain Jacques Vichot, director of the museum from 1943 to 1971, decided to create a large documentation center accessible to the public
The expatriated Musée de la Marine - Exhibitions in North America
In 2000, the reserves were moved from the limited space of Chaillot. Major exhibitions such as Les Trésors du Musée national de la Marine (Treasures of the National Maritime Museum), which circulated from 2000 onwards between Quebec and the United States, or Les Génies de la Mer (Geniuses of the Sea), an exhibition produced in 2001 in partnership with the Musée national des Beaux-Arts du Québec and presented in 2003 at the Maritime Museum in Sydney.
The Musée de la Marine, which closed in 2017 is to be completely renovated in 2022.
The regional branches of the Musée de la Marine
The Musée National de la Marine federates 4 other navy museums in Provine.
The Brest museum, located in the castle of Brest, houses a heritage testifying the history of the Brest arsenal and the French Navy.
The National Museum of the Navy of Port-Louis is located in the citadel of Port-Louis (Morbihan in Brittany), opposite the museum of the Compagnie des Indes. Part of its collections is dedicated to sea rescue. The second part is dedicated to the maritime routes of the Far East.
The museum is located in the oldest civil building in the city, the Hôtel de Cheusses. The collections of models of ships from the arsenal, ornamental sculptures, and other objects from the navy that are exhibited there bear witness to the exceptional military destiny of the town of Rochefort.
The National Museum of the Navy of Toulon is installed since 1981 next to the clock tower of the arsenal. It illustrates the maritime tradition in the Mediterranean by a collection of models of ships and galleys.
The collections of the National Museum of the Navy in Paris
The Musée de la Marine in Paris holds 30,000 objects and works of art, including most of Joseph Vernet's series of Views of the Ports of France, figureheads, and 2,822 models of ships from all periods, including sailing warships from the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries.
There are also two important pieces:
Canoe of Emperor Napoleon I (To be seen at the Brest branch Museum)
The canoe is 18.80 m long, 3.80 m wide, and a little over 5 m high. It has 2 rows of 11 decorated oars and a rear roof topped by a crown carried by 4 cherubs. The figurehead represents Neptune.
Designed by the engineer Guillemard on the model of a Venetian ship, its construction was supervised by Théaud and lasted 21 days in the Antwerp arsenals, in Belgium, which the emperor had created a few years earlier. The Antwerp sculptor Van Petersen was responsible for the ornaments. Napoleon I and Empress Marie-Louise paraded on board on April 30, 1810.
In 1814, after the fall of the Empire, it was entrusted to the arsenal of Brest, reputedly unfriendly to Napoleon. A few years later, its ornamentation was largely replaced by the Brest sculptor Yves Collet: the Neptune on the bow, a dolphin, a triton.
During the Second Empire, it was brought out again for the arrival of Napoleon III and his wife Eugenie, as shown on a painting by Auguste Mayer in 1859. The boat was then kept in the arsenal and used for training apprentice sailors.
In 1943, due to the fear of bombing the Brest arsenals, it was transferred to the Musée de la Marine in Paris, which required a breach in the walls of the Palais de Chaillot so that it could enter the building. It will be exhibited there until its return to Brest in 2018, 73 years after the end of the war.
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