For more than six years, behind the colonnade of the Palais de Chaillot, one of the oldest naval collections in Europe sat shut inside a building site. The Musée national de la Marine closed in 2017, occupies the west wing of the palace, the Passy side, and reopened on 17 November 2023 with everything remade, from the curatorial project to the route, and with more than a thousand restored objects.
It closes on Tuesdays, like the other two museums in the building, and the first thing to know concerns an object: the piece this museum was famous for, the emperor’s barge, is no longer in Paris, and further down I tell you where it went and why.
What is left of a museum when its most celebrated piece is taken away?
Let’s begin!
1. The emperor’s barge, which is now in Brest
I start with what is missing, because half the internet still reports it as present. The canot de l’Empereur, the ceremonial boat built in 1810 for Napoleon, with the gilded crown held by four putti at the stern, was taken to Brest in October 2018, after seventy-five years in Paris, while the works began here.
In Brest it stayed. It was restored in eight weeks, at a cost of 1.2 million euros, half of it funded by Brest métropole, and it is displayed under a large mirror at the Ateliers des Capucins, in front of the 70.8 centre that opened in May 2021. If you came this far to see it, the detour is Brittany: better to know before you buy the ticket.
2. The interior of the port of Marseille, where the subject is the quay
How do you paint a harbour without making it look like a postcard?
Look at the photograph at the top of this page and count the people. Joseph Vernet painted this canvas in 1754, as part of the campaign on the ports of France that Louis XV had commissioned from him, and he put neither a ship nor a monument at the centre: he put the quay.
In the foreground are bales, crates, jars and barrels, and among them a swarm of people arguing, loading, stopping to talk. Behind them the sailing ships have their masts drawn up like a palisade; at the far end, at the harbour mouth, stands the tower, and on the right the row of houses of the Vieux-Port with its bell tower. What you see is a workplace, not a view: the harbour is told from the side of the people who worked in it. The museum shows it among its flagship pieces, and it is the canvas to start from.
3. The Amphitrite figurehead, and the figures that hung below the bowsprit
A female figure in wood painted white, her dress slipping off one shoulder, a shell raised above her head and her feet on a curl of wave.
It is the figurehead of the frigate Amphitrite, of 1810. Walk round it and notice something that could not be seen at sea: it is carved to be looked at from below and from the side, because it was tilted under the bowsprit, a few metres above the water. Here, set down on the floor of a room, it looks at you from above with its face turned, and the twist that at sea served to make it visible from the shore becomes a theatrical gesture.
4. The plan of the brig Vigilante, which the museum did not hide
This is the stop that changes the tone of the visit, and rightly so. It is an engraving of 1823 representing the slave brig Vigilante, out of Nantes and captured by Lieutenant Mildmay in the River Bonny, on the African coast, on 15 April 1822.
Read it as a technical document, because that is how it was drawn. At the top the longitudinal section, then the upper deck, then the plan of the lower deck: and there the human figures are drawn side by side, in their hundreds, with the number written in the margin, two hundred and twenty-five in the men’s room and a hundred and twenty in the women’s. On the left the iron collar, the padlock and the irons for arms and legs, drawn with the same care. It was the abolitionist press that turned it into an instrument: it put in front of people’s eyes, on a single sheet, what no account managed to make clear.
5. The reopened windows, with the Eiffel Tower inside the museum
One of the changes made by the works has nothing to do with the objects. The large windows of the palace, which had been blocked up, have been reopened, and the visual connection between inside and outside is back: from the rooms you can once again see the Eiffel Tower and the Trocadéro gardens.
Stop at one of those windows with a ship model in front of you. It is the moment when the collection stops being a warehouse of vessels and becomes one thing with the building that houses it: a 1937 palace on the hill that looks at the Seine, in a city that does not touch the sea.
6. What «reopened museum» means in practice
Why do you find photographs of this museum online that do not match?
Because almost all of them are from before. The museum stayed closed from 2017 to November 2023, and in those six years and more everything changed: the museography, the route, the lighting, the arrangement of the rooms. The images that have been circulating longest, and that search engines reward, show the old display.
Take it as a practical warning. If you prepare your visit on photographs and articles older than 2023, you are preparing for a museum that no longer exists, and the collection is in front of you in a different order. Take the plan at the entrance: it costs nothing and saves you half an hour of walking in circles.
Practical information
Details checked on 25 September 2026 on the official site musee-marine.fr. Prices and opening hours change: check again before you go.
Tickets. The full price is 15 euros. The reduced price is 12 euros and applies to large families and to veterans, on proof. Free admission. Under-18s get in free, as do 18 to 25-year-olds resident in the EU, Pass Education holders, serving military and civilian Defence personnel, people on social assistance, jobseekers and disabled visitors with a companion. Opening hours. The museum opens every day except Tuesday, from 11:00 to 19:00, and the last entry is an hour before closing. On the first Thursday of the month it stays open until 22:00. Closing days. It closes on Tuesdays, plus 1 January, 1 May, 14 July and 25 December. On 24 and 31 December it closes at 17:00. Paris Museum Pass. The museum is included in the pass. Getting there. The entrance is at the Palais de Chaillot, 17 place du Trocadéro. The stop is Trocadéro, on lines 6 and 9. How long it takes. The six stops need an hour and a half, and anyone who looks at the models one by one reaches three hours.
The exhibitions on at the museum, with their dates, are in the table of exhibitions in Paris.
Where to go from here
Under the same roof, and with a ticket each, are the Cité de l’architecture and the Musée de l’Homme: the pass covers the first and not the second. Going down towards the Seine you find the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris, free in its permanent collection, the fashion museum at the Palais Galliera and the Musée Guimet on place d’Iéna. If ships interest you more than art, the other models and the weapons of the navy are at the Invalides, in the Musée de l’Armée.
Photo credits: L’Intérieur du port de Marseille by Joseph Vernet and the plan of the brig Vigilante, public domain; Amphitrite figurehead by Jonathan Queutois (CC0), from Wikimedia Commons.
