The Musée national de la Marine, Paris

The Musée national de la Marine is the French maritime museum with its main location in Paris and annexes in Brest, Port-Louis, Rochefort and Toulon. The Paris museum buildings are close to the Eiffel tower, a convenient location for any tourist.

The museum has a large and fine collection of ship models showing the development of French naval engineering till the early 1900s. There are many contemporary ship models dating back to the 1700s and a fine selection of paintings. Some sailing ship models of 3 - 4 m length have been used for training officers and naval engineers. They display a remarkable degree of detail.
For more information see the homepage of the Musée de la Marine.

The picture above shows the barge Le Canot Imperial in the museum's entrance hall. The barge was built in 1811 for Napoleon's inspection of the fortifications of Antwerp. Here are some more photos of this barge.
The ship model most in demand is probably the Soleil Royal. I show 26 pictures (1.5 MB in total) taken by Dr. Markus Leber: Photo gallery of the Soleil Royal

If you click on a photo you will get that photo in high resolution. (If you use Microsoft Internet Explorer or Firefox, press F11 to minimize navigation bars and have a larger screen with the photos.)