Argonaute, Military submarine museum at La Villette, France
Argonaute is a military submarine from the 1950s at the La Villette museum. The diesel-electric vessel has a narrow cylindrical shape, a tower in the middle, and now rests on solid ground beside the exhibition halls of Cité des Sciences.
Argonaute was laid down at the Arsenal de Cherbourg in March 1955, launched on 29 June 1957 and commissioned on 11 February 1959. It served in the Mediterranean, based at Mers el-Kébir then Toulon, and was decommissioned on 31 July 1982 after 2,147 days at sea. Saved from scrapping, it was towed to Paris in 1989 and opened to the public in 1991 outside the Cité des sciences et de l'industrie.
The name comes from the Greek hero who sailed with his companions in search of the golden fleece. Visitors today walk through the narrow corridors and compartments, seeing how the crew lived and worked beneath the surface.
You can see the tubes, valves and instruments in the different compartments from the inside. Access is only possible via ladders and low passages, so visitors with limited mobility should keep this in mind.
The submarine was not cut up: it stayed whole, carried in 1989 on a 94-metre barge towed via Gibraltar to Le Havre, then up the Seine to Gennevilliers, where a dozen float balloons raised the barge's draught so it could pass the seven locks of the Saint-Denis Canal. At the Canal de l'Ourcq quay cranes lifted it out and a trailer hauled it 400 metres to its present spot.
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