Anglet (Pyrénées-Atlantiques). It’s a reprieve, which perhaps announces the end of an adventure. On September 18, the La Rochelle court placed the Hermione-La Fayette association, which manages the restoration of the replica of the famous three-masted ship, in receivership proceedings. To avoid the permanent shutdown of the construction site, the association has a period of four to six months to raise the missing funds. The Court of Auditors already sounded the alarm in a report published last June, noting that there was still a lack of “nearly 4.5 million euros, out of a total amount of work estimated at 10 million euros”. A financial situation that she then described as “very tense”, making“It is urgent to obtain this private financing”.
Hermione shipyard.
© Maxime Franusiak / Hermione La Fayette Association
Since then, the situation has hardly improved. If the association presents this procedure as a “positive measure” in a press release, considering that it means “that a continuation of the project is still possible” and remembering that “€500,000 in support has been raised over the last three months”the budget remains far from being finalized. And the restoration project is at a standstill. Since 2021, L’Hermione has been placed in dry dock at the port of Anglet while waiting to be able to set sail again towards Rochefort, its home base. It was there that the frigate – an exact replica of the one that took the Marquis de La Fayette to help the American insurgents in 1779 – was built between 1997 and 2011, at a cost of 25 million euros. Barely ten years later, Hermione must already be rehabilitated, its internal structure having been greatly deteriorated by the appearance of two xylophagous fungi, the polypore and the lenzite. Suspended due to lack of resources since July 2024, the project could only be completed in half: the rear part of the ship has been completely rebuilt, but the entire hull still needs to be inspected.
