The Argonaute Submarine
French Navy, built at Cherbourg naval dockyard · Launched 1957, in service 1958 to 1982
A real submarine lies in the park beside the Géode, its black hull raised on supports as if in dry dock, with a low pavilion built against its side for the ticket desk and a small exhibition on underwater life. This is the Argonaute, a French Navy attack submarine that served from 1958 to 1982, sailed more than three hundred thousand nautical miles and spent over thirty thousand hours submerged before being retired. It is small by modern standards, about fifty metres long, and it was designed to hunt other submarines quietly in the Mediterranean with a crew of about forty men.
Go inside and the scale hits you. You enter by the forward torpedo room, where the tubes and reload racks fill the compartment, then squeeze through hatches past bunks stacked three high, the tiny galley, the control room with its periscopes and the diesel engines aft. An audio guide tells the story of life aboard. Look at the ingenuity of the fittings, the bunks shared by men on different watches, the valves and gauges labelled by hand, and the sheer absence of privacy. Children love it; anyone tall or claustrophobic will find it a memorable squeeze.
The Argonaute was built at Cherbourg in the 1950s as part of the rebuilding of the French fleet after the war and was one of four boats of her class. After decommissioning she was towed up the Seine and the canals to La Villette in 1989 and opened to visitors in 1991, one of the very few submarines that can be visited in a city centre anywhere. Outside, the exhibition explains how a submarine dives, navigates and listens, and how modern nuclear boats differ from this diesel electric ancestor.
Did You Know? To reach the park the submarine had to be towed up the Seine and the canals, then hauled out and moved on land to its present spot.
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