Musée national de la Marine, Trocadéro maritime museum since 1827

The Musée national de la Marine was born in 1827, when Charles X set up a naval museum at the Louvre, named the Musée Dauphin in honour of the Duke of Angoulême, Grand Admiral of France. Since 1943 it has occupied the Passy wing of the Palais de Chaillot, on the place du Trocadéro.

The collection goes back to 1748, when Duhamel du Monceau gave Louis XV his models of ships and dockyard machines, shown at the Louvre in the ‘Salle de Marine’. Pierre-Amédée Zédé, the museum’s first curator, opened a model workshop in 1829 on the dockyard pattern; the painter Léon Morel-Fatio published the first catalogue in 1853.

Renamed the naval museum after the July Revolution, it later shared the Passy wing at Chaillot with the Musée de l’Homme, opening there on 15 August 1943. Closed in 2017, it was entirely renovated by Snøhetta and h2o and reopened in 2023. It forms a network with Brest, Port-Louis, Rochefort and Toulon.

In the 16th arrondissement, the museum shows dockyard models built faithfully to each ship’s plans, marine paintings, and the figureheads that embodied a vessel’s soul at the front of its hull. The collections tell France’s maritime and naval history.