France fields one of the world's larger navies, roughly eighty surface combatants built around firing platforms loaded with modern sensors and weapons. This film traces how that force got here, using archive photographs, expert interviews, and 3D modeling to walk through the warship's design history from seventeenth-century oar-powered galleys to the armored battleships of the Second World War. Naval historians explain what each generation of ship was built to do and why it eventually became obsolete, whether that meant broadside cannon giving way to rifled guns or coal giving way to oil and then to gas turbines. The film pays attention to the practical problems each era's engineers were solving, like keeping a wooden hull from splintering under cannon fire or armoring a steel deck against aerial bombs without making the ship too heavy to move. It closes on the technology present-day vessels inherited from all of it, tying the galley's oarsmen to the missile cruiser's turbine room as one continuous engineering argument.