Timeline

Key figures

Origin and history

The Rochefort Marine National Museum is housed in the Cheusses Hotel, the oldest civilian building in the city, built in the early seventeenth century. Originally, this building served as a home for the lords of Rochefort, then successively housed the command, stewardship and police station of the Navy after the founding of the arsenal in 1666. Ranked a historic monument in 1932, it became a naval museum in 1936, before closing in 1940. Reorganized in 1966, it reopened in 1973 and since 1978 integrates the network of the National Marine Museum.

The museum's collections come largely from the models and machines of the arsenal, as well as from the "Museum of Small Models", dispersed during the Second World War and then reconstituted. The museum journey explores the technical, military, social and scientific history of the Rochefort arsenal, founded by Colbert in 1666. There are models of ships, ornamental sculptures, navigational instruments, as well as testimonies on the life of the bagards, the arsenal being once linked to one of the most important bays in France.

The Cheusses hotel, with its U-plan and 18th century woodwork, illustrates the architecture of the mansions of the time. The museum showcases iconic pieces such as the model of the redoub shape of 1671 (the oldest in the world), wooden bow figures, or a duguay-Trouin cabestan (1800). It is part of a larger heritage complex, including the Royal Corderie, the archives of the Atlantic Navy, and other local museums dedicated to naval aeronautics or naval medicine.

Since 2008, the museum has modernized its spaces, with a new entrance directly linking it to the arsenal district and the Royal Corderie, where L的Hermione is rebuilt. It attracts about 30,000 visitors a year, mainly tourists in the summer. Rochefort, a 17th century new town designed for shipbuilding, finds a showcase of its exceptional maritime heritage, marked by centuries of technical innovations and distant expeditions.

The museum's fonds cover a variety of topics: naval architecture, the social life of the arsenal, scientific explorations, and even the imagination of travel. The collections include paintings, weapons, navigation tools, and archives of French overseas presences (Canada, Louisiana, West Indies). The Cheusses hotel, expropriated in 1685 during the revocation of the edict of Nantes, also housed military figures like Tourville or La Galissonnière, before becoming a place of memory dedicated to French maritime glory.

External links