REALISING THE DREAM A French entrepreneur wants to build a ship that will revive the glory of the SS France. Peter Mercer reports.
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ll this summer Parisians and tourists alike have been taking time to visit the Musée de la Marine in Paris’ Trocadero to take a trip back to the 1960s. The museum has assembled more than 800 objects that once belonged to the great transatlantic liner, the SS France – the legendary ship that was not only in its day the longest and fastest liner ever built but was also the embodiment of French national pride and a showcase for modern French decorative art. Launched in 1960, the 66,000-tonne France could carry 2000 passengers across the Atlantic in five days and became the favourite ship of the wealthy and famous, not least because of the lavishness of its cuisine – a dinner menu from 1973 lists ten courses. But in a corner of the exhibition is a small model of the machine that sealed the fate not just of the France but of all the great transatlantic liners – the Boeing 707 airliner. The first passenger jet to be commercially successful, the 707 entered airline service in 1958 and by the 1960s was dominating the passenger jet transport market. So by the time it entered service in 1962 the France was already a glorious anachronism, kept afloat only by huge state subsidies. When the oil price boom of the early 1970s pushed operating costs even higher, even the French government had had enough and decided to put its citizens’ money instead into another technological wonder – Concorde. The great liner, renamed Norway, sailed on for another 14 Industry Europe
25 years as a cruise ship but finally met the usual sad end, broken up on a beach in India. Apart from the memories assembled in the Musée de la Marine, nothing remains of her but the prow, which was returned to France and which now stands outside the Paris yacht marina at Port de Grenelle.
Le nouveau France However, in another corner of the exhibition space is a small display of a remarkable project to build a new ship that will be an ‘international ambassador’ for France for the 21st century; that will once again provide its passengers with the best that France has to offer in luxury, refinement and good taste, that will, like the old France, embody the French ‘art de vivre’. Le nouveau France will, of course, be a very different vessel from its illustrious predecessor: a cruise ship rather than a passenger liner, and much smaller – 260m as against 315m – with space for no more than 700 passengers. With a speed of around 18 knots it will also be much slower than the old France (32 knots) but the idea is that cruising doesn’t require high speeds and extra knots come at the cost of energy efficiency. The new France will also be radically different from the huge cruise liners that typify the industry today, giants capable of carrying up to 6000 passengers in what the new ship’s promoter calls ‘floating amusement parks’. It will rather be an elegant cruise
ship that will prioritise quality over quantity, meeting the growing demand for upmarket holidays for people willing to pay up to €7000 a week to cruise the Mediterranean or the Caribbean. “With an overall length of only 260 metres and a capacity limited to around 600 passengers, the new France will give holidaymakers the feeling of being on a private yacht ‘de grand classe’,” explains the promoter, Didier Spade. “For this concept to work it has to be totally different from today’s cruise ships. In place of speed and ‘gigantism’ our new ship will take the way of comfort, of ‘bien-être’ and of friendliness to nature.” Didier Spade, and his company Seine Alliance, are well known in Paris for a highly successful river boat business. At the age of 28 he set up the Compagnie des Bateaux à Roue to operate four paddle boats on the Seine and later founded the Paris Yacht Marina. Then in 2007 he launched the Clipper Paris, a super yacht constructed at Saint Nazaire shipyard which introduced the concept of ‘yachting de luxe’ on the Seine. Big companies and show-business people can hire this boat to entertain clients, staff or friends as if it was their own private yacht. However, even though Mr Spade is the grandson of one of the interior designers of the original France, his experience so far has been entirely in river boats and, as many sceptics have pointed out, it is a big step from those to an ocean cruise liner. But Mr
