Jules Verne Meets Leonardo on the Loire: The Art Behind Nantes' Machines
Look at the back of the Grand Éléphant before you look at the elephant. There’s a house up there. Little pavilions with red pointed gables and open doorways sit on its flanks, iron balconies wrap around them, and a canvas canopy on curved ribs shades a top deck where, on the day I took this, a school group in yellow hi-vis vests was waving at everybody on the ground. A man on the lower balcony waved back at my camera. It’s a building that walks. Anyone who has read late Jules Verne will know where it came from.
The Elephant Verne Wrote in 1880
Verne was born in Nantes in 1828, on the Île Feydeau, a few hundred metres from where this machine now lives. In 1880 he published La Maison à vapeur (The Steam House), in which a party of British travellers crosses northern India in two rolling houses pulled by Behemoth, a steel elephant driven by steam. The engineer Banks designs it. The elephant shape is a costume; underneath, it’s a locomotive.
Nantes built the same idea and then did something Verne never needed to do. It made it real. The Grand Éléphant is 12 metres tall, 21 metres long and weighs 48.4 tonnes. Around fifty passengers ride it at one to three kilometres an hour. The skin is carved tulipwood over a steel skeleton, and the movement comes from 62 cylinders (most of them hydraulic) fed by thousands of litres of oil. Since 2018 it has run on a hybrid motor, so the old diesel roar is gone.
The difference from Verne is in what you’re allowed to see. Banks hides his boiler inside the beast. Here the driver sits in a glass cab slung under the head, in full view, and passengers on the deck look straight down at the gears working the legs. The costume is honest about being a costume. That’s the whole aesthetic.
Leonardo Came Down the Same River
The creators, François Delarozière and Pierre Orefice, describe the project as sitting where Verne’s invented worlds meet the mechanical universe of Leonardo da Vinci, with the industrial history of Nantes as the ground both stand on. The Leonardo half of that is less of a stretch than it sounds.
Leonardo spent his last three years on the Loire. Francis I brought him to France in 1516 and lodged him at the Clos Lucé in Amboise, upriver from Nantes, where he died in 1519. Before that he had built the king a mechanical lion that walked forward and opened its chest to show a spray of lilies. A walking animal machine, made to astonish a crowd, powered by hidden works. Put that next to the Grand Éléphant and the family resemblance is hard to miss.
The deeper debt is in the drawing. Leonardo’s notebooks show every joint and pulley, the thinking laid bare on the page. The Galerie des Machines does the same thing in three dimensions: sketches, prototypes and finished creatures share one hall, and the workshop terraces let you watch the next machine being made. Look closely at the elephant’s legs in the photo. The tulipwood is covered in criss-crossed gouges, chisel marks left deliberately rough. From ten metres away they read like cross-hatching on a Renaissance sheet.
Delarozière’s company, La Machine, founded in 1999, had already built The Sultan’s Elephant for the Nantes street theatre troupe Royal de Luxe in 2005, the giant that walked through London a year later. That one was a performer. The Nantes elephant is its descendant with a passenger deck.
The Shipyard Is the Third Author
None of this would make sense anywhere else. The Machines stand on the western tip of the Île de Nantes, in the halls of the old Dubigeon shipyards, which closed in 1987. Nantes Métropole commissioned the project in 2004 as part of Alexandre Chemetoff’s plan to regenerate the island, and the elephant was inaugurated in the summer of 2007. The Carrousel des Mondes Marins followed in 2012.
A city that spent generations building ships now builds animals in the same halls, with welders, carpenters and hydraulic engineers doing work the old yards would recognise. The riveted plates on the elephant’s ears aren’t decoration borrowed from steampunk. They’re shipyard grammar.
There’s an older French elephant in the background too. Napoleon wanted a giant bronze one for the Place de la Bastille; only a full-size plaster model was ever made, and it slowly fell apart until it was cleared away in the 1840s. Victor Hugo gave it a second life by putting the street boy Gavroche inside it in Les Misérables. Paris dreamed the elephant. Nantes finished it, and put a staircase in.
Not every dream survived. The Heron Tree, a 35-metre steel tree with hanging gardens and two passenger herons, was meant to be the next great machine. Nantes Métropole stopped it in 2022, then confirmed the decision the following year after a study of private funding. The Grand Héron built for it still stands by the Nefs, a bird that outlived its tree.
The elephant keeps walking.