The new president of the Armada, Jean-Paul Rivière presented the highlights of the next Armada de Rouen (Seine-Maritime), the largest gathering of tall ships in the world, which will take place from June 8 to 18, 2023

It was aboard the three-master Le Français, on January 18, 2022, that Jean-Paul Rivière, the successor to Patrick Herr, presented the preliminary program for the future Rouen Armada, from June 8 to 18, 2023. For this eighth edition, the main ingredients of what made the success of a formula received in 1989 to animate the quays of the Seine then neglected are preserved.
Here is what is changing and what will be maintained.

Now at the helm of the Armada, Jean-Paul Rivière explains that he does not want to change course:
“The course has been charted for 30 years and there is no question of changing it! I am also an entrepreneur, and I know that when things are going well, you should not change them too much. It takes a lot chemistry for a business to work well, and you have to be careful not to upset things too much”

“Before, it was the Armada of Patrick Herr. My mission, for 2023, is to make the Armada a common good of the Normans and of Normandy.”

Jean-Paul Rivière, president of the Armada 2023

As in previous editions, the 6 million visitors will find ten days of celebration along the 7 kilometers of quays with 45 sailboats and military ships, as well as thousands of sailors representing 20 nationalities. Specific to the Rouen gathering, free admission will also be maintained in 2023: free access to the site and free visits to the boats during the day.

In terms of entertainment (also free) there are regional concerts and fireworks every evening, the big mess, the parade of sailors in the streets of the city center, jogging on the quays and, last day, the great parade of boats going down the Seine from Rouen to the sea.

Regardless of the COVID issue and what the health situation will be in June 2023, access to the Armada site will remain subject to security checks due to the terrorist threat. To avoid the long lines of 2019, additional entry points will be added.

A reflection is underway for more innovative and modern fireworks.

The free concerts in the Region, criticized in 2019, will see their programming improved.

Jean-Paul Rivière presented two great novelties for the next Armada. He explained that he had wished, once he became president, to want to add two important things: more culture and ecology. Sailor and sailing enthusiast, he wants to raise public awareness of the protection and safeguarding of the oceans. To do this, it has initiated two major scientific conferences and the participation of Rouen, from 2022, in World Oceans Day.

To “bring more culture in order to go beyond the dream we have at the foot of the boats”, the new president of the Armada asked the writer Michel Bussi to become the sponsor of the 2023 edition.

One of the best-selling author’s first thrillers is “Dying on the Seine”, whose action takes place during the Armada and allows the reader to trace the thread of the history of the great forgotten Rouen and Norman navigators.

Also a geographer and academic, Michel Bussi has worked for a long time on what in thirty years the Armada has brought to the transformation of the city and the new relationship of its inhabitants with the river. It is therefore quite natural that he accepted the challenge of implementing a major popular and festive cultural project (the form and media of which remain to be defined) to make known to the general public (but also to schoolchildren) the proud and rich maritime past of Rouen and its navigators and explorers who set out on the seas of the world.

Michel Bussi will work with one of the vice-presidents of the Armada in charge of steering this Culture file, a certain Yvon Robert, former mayor of Rouen and former executive of National Education.

The Armada team is currently approaching the TV channels to offer an adaptation of the novel “Meurtre sur Seine”, the filming of which could begin in June 2023 with the boats gathered in Rouen.

The Covid pandemic has, in several countries, blocked many tall ships at the dock. It is therefore still too early to know who will be able to come to Rouen in June 2023 after a two-year hiatus. As Jean-Paul Rivière explained, invitations have been issued and the answers will arrive soon : “We are targeting 80 boats, i.e. all the boats that have already come to the Armada. And we are also contacting a few new boats.”

The answers are favorable for the “Normandie” frigate of the French Navy. For the other novelties, it is a question of inviting ships specialized in the protection of the oceans.

One week after International Bicycle Day (June 3), hundreds of cyclists will leave the Eiffel Tower to go to the Rouen Armada, joined along the route between Paris and Rouen, by all cycling enthusiasts… and boats!