Le Glorieux was laid down at the Arsenal de Cherbourg on 10 February 1930 and launched on 29 November 1932. She belonged to the Redoutable class, a series of 31 deep-sea patrol submarines the French called "1,500-tonners" for their surface displacement of 1,572 tons. At 92.3 meters long, they were substantial vessels, capable of 18.6 knots on the surface and 10 knots submerged. Their range was remarkable: 10,000 nautical miles at 10 knots on the surface, enough to cross an ocean and come back. Le Glorieux was one of only three boats in her class fitted with a radio direction finder, a piece of equipment that would prove useful in the years ahead. When she entered service, no one imagined that her career would span three navies, two hemispheres, and a world war.

When war broke out in September 1939, Le Glorieux was sent to patrol off Madeira, where the Allies suspected German merchant ships were serving as supply vessels for U-boats. The most dramatic incident was almost comic: the British cargo ship Egba refused to stop for inspection, even after Le Glorieux fired warning shots. In February 1940, she conducted anti-submarine warfare exercises with a British Royal Navy destroyer northwest of Freetown, Sierra Leone. These early months were a phoney war at sea -- long patrols, few contacts, the tension of waiting for a fight that hadn't yet materialized. Then France fell.

After the armistice of June 1940, Le Glorieux found herself in the fleet of Vichy France, based at Dakar in West Africa. She continued operating, though now in an awkward limbo: technically neutral, practically hostile to her former British allies. She collided with an accommodation hulk during training in September 1941, a mundane accident that required ten days of repair. By 1942 she had moved to the Indian Ocean, and in April she was dispatched to Majunga on Madagascar's west coast for a remarkable side mission -- using her diesel engines to generate electricity for a cement plant whose machinery had broken down. It was a strange chapter: a submarine designed to hunt warships, repurposed as a floating power station.

The Allied invasion of North Africa in November 1942 forced a choice. When the surviving French fleet in North Africa joined the Free French Naval Forces, Le Glorieux followed suit after reaching Oran. She was sent to Bermuda to serve as a submerged target for American anti-submarine training, then crossed to Philadelphia for a major overhaul. American engineers grumbled about the lack of standardization among the four Redoutable-class boats in the shipyard -- two had Schneider diesels, two had Sulzer -- but they also admitted the twenty-year-old design remained impressively modern. At Philadelphia, Le Glorieux received new batteries, a thickened hull, improved soundproofing, air conditioning, a refrigerator, and an Oerlikon 20mm anti-aircraft gun. Charles de Gaulle ordered her to prepare for the Pacific war against Japan, but Vice Admiral Andre Lemonnier successfully argued the boat was too old for such distant service.

After the Mediterranean war ended, Le Glorieux spent December 1944 generating electric power at Toulon while her crew took leave -- once again, a submarine pressed into service as a generator. She emerged from a postwar refit at Cherbourg in November 1946 with a test depth of 120 meters, forty meters deeper than her original design, thanks to modifications made in both Philadelphia and Cherbourg. She was awarded the Resistance Medal on 29 November 1946. In 1947, she cruised African waters alongside the captured German Type XXI submarine U-2518, allowing the French Navy to study the revolutionary technology that had nearly won the Battle of the Atlantic for Germany. In 1949, she played the role of her sister ship Casabianca in a French war film. Le Glorieux was the last Redoutable-class submarine in service when she was finally decommissioned on 27 October 1952, having outlasted 26 of her 30 sisters.