Statue of Commandant Taillez

Philippe Tailliez was born on June 15, 1905 in Malo-les-Bains (Nord) and died on September 25, 2002 in Toulon (Var). He was a French naval officer, scuba diver and writer, poet and thinker. He is best known as one of the pioneers of scuba diving, along with Frédéric Dumas and Jacques-Yves Cousteau.
The son of a naval officer, he spent his youth in Dunkirk and Brittany. A career sailor, his father Félix Tailliez, stationed in Tahiti at the time, recounted in his letters stories of skin divers, which fascinated his youngest son Philippe (who had an older brother, Jean, who also became a naval officer, and two sisters, Monique and Françoise). Philippe Tailliez entered the École navale in 1924, and was posted to Toulon.
He developed a passion for freediving, hunting and underwater photography. He became the Navy's swimming champion.

Philippe Tailliez, then a torpedo boat officer on the Condorcet, met gunner Jacques-Yves Cousteau, who introduced him to diving and the underwater world.
Philippe Tailliez was a great cinema enthusiast, owning a camera and dreaming of making underwater films. This dream would take several years to come true. But it was Austrian Hans Hass who made the first underwater film in 1939 in the West Indies.
In 1938, Philippe Tailliez met an already renowned underwater hunter, Frédéric Dumas, on the islands of Les Embiez in the Var region of France.
The Tailliez-Cousteau-Dumas trio would go on to make their mark on French diving history. In 1975, Tailliez dubbed them "the Three Mousquemers".
But the Second World War would temporarily separate their team, and Philippe Tailliez would take part in the Syrian campaign, a naval battle pitting the Vichy and British navies against each other.

In 1950, Philippe Tailliez left the command of the group, which had become G.E.R.S. (Groupe d'études et de recherches sous-marines), to take command of the Marcel Le Bihan aviation tender, which he led to Dakar, then to Saigon to take part in military operations in Indochina.
On January 20, 1955, he was appointed to command the Rhin Nord flotilla (Les Vosges base ship) in Koblenz-Bingen, West Germany, as part of the Forces Maritimes du Rhin, where he was soon joined by the maneuvering petty officer Elies, who had been one of the most solid instructors of his underwater intervention section in the Far East, and who would later form and lead the Rhin flotilla's underwater intervention group. On April 22, 1956, the Tailliez - Elies pair made the first dive into the Binger Loch abyss, the deepest point on the river. Tailliez recounts this "Plongée dans la Lorelei" in an article in Revue Maritime, special issue 172, Christmas 1960.
President Nasser's attempt to nationalize the Suez Canal in 1956, which led to the Franco-English reaction of November 1956, had a profound effect on Commandant Tailliez, who was also responsible for part of a "canal" teeming with life, the Rhine, a vital economic artery with traffic equivalent to that of the Suez Canal: 100 million tonnes.
On August 1, 1956, he took up a new assignment in Toulon, once again in the field of scuba diving.
Together with inventor Heinz Sellner, whom he had met in Germany, he embarked on another innovative technological adventure: the construction of a revolutionary bathyscaphe, the Aquarius (using air in liquid/gaseous phases instead of gasoline as the hydrostatic fluid). However, in the absence of appropriate funding, the technical realization of the prototype remained imperfect and the first trials failed: the project had to be abandoned - with regret - a few years later.
From 1960 to 1963, Philippe Tailliez chaired the FFESSM's National Technical Commission and was one of the founding members of CMAS (Confédération Mondiale des Activités Subaquatiques).
At the same time, he has been involved in underwater archaeology, working on a number of projects with the French Directorate of Underwater Archaeological Research and the French Navy. Since its creation in 1982, he has chaired the GRAN (Groupe de Recherche en Archéologie Navale).
In his notes to his friend Jean-Christophe Jeauffre and biographer Patrick Mouton, Tailliez explains that, after meeting Jacques Grob in the 1950s, a Swiss naturist living between Carqueiranne and Le Pradet on the produce from his garden and underwater fishing, he became aware of the limits and fragility of the marine environment. Then still considered infinitely fertile and capable of absorbing everything, he informed Frédéric Dumas, who believed that scientific and technological progress would enable him to find solutions to these issues. Jacques-Yves Cousteau began to have doubts about these solutions, and adopted (and then widely broadcast on television) positions that were increasingly concerned about the environment. After 1960, when he retired from the Navy, Tailliez devoted himself to protecting the marine environment, and was a founding member of the Scientific Committee of the Port-Cros National Park, created in 1964, and of the Institut océanographique Paul Ricard.
Following publication of the 1st edition of his book Plongées sans câble (1954), he became a frigate captain. He then ended his active military career with the rank of captain.
In 1997, Philippe Tailliez received a NOGI Award from The Academy of Underwater Arts & Science for "Services Rendered to Humanity", and it was not until January 1999, at the age of 94, that he travelled to Louisiana (USA) to meet representatives of the North American underwater world, and take part in a press conference at the DEMA Show, held in New Orleans.

Classification/labels

• Memorial

Spoken languages

• French