Because Cousteau spent his life at sea, many people imagine he must have died there. The truth is more ordinary. He lived to 87, still campaigning and still planning new projects, and died at home in Paris of heart failure after months of illness. But his last decade was anything but quiet. He lost his wife of more than fifty years, remarried, saw his famous ship sink, won a major environmental victory over Antarctica and fought a bitter legal battle with his own son. Understanding those years helps make sense of how the world remembered him when he died.

This page sticks to what is well documented. Where accounts differ, I have said so.

The cause of death

Cousteau died on 25 June 1997 in Paris. The Cousteau Society and news reports at the time said he died of a heart attack while recovering from a respiratory infection.

He had been ill for some months beforehand, and his public appearances had become rare. Reports at the time described a lung infection that had left him weak, followed by a fatal heart attack. He was 87, just two weeks past his birthday, which fell on 11 June. For a man who had spent so much of his life aboard ships and at the coast, it was a quiet end, far from the sea, in the city where he had grown up. There has never been any serious suggestion of anything unusual about his death; it was the death of a very old man who had lived an extraordinarily active life.

The news made front pages around the world. In France he was a national figure, a member of the Académie française, and the head of state paid tribute. In the United States, where his television series had been a fixture for decades, many people learned of his death on the evening news, and his long association with American audiences meant obituaries ran in almost every major newspaper.

Funeral at Notre-Dame and burial at Saint-André-de-Cubzac

Cousteau was given a funeral service at Notre-Dame de Paris, an honour reserved for very prominent French figures.

Crowds gathered outside the cathedral, and the ceremony was attended by family, members of his teams, public figures and representatives of the many organisations he had worked with. He was then buried in the family vault in Saint-André-de-Cubzac, the small town in the Gironde, near Bordeaux, where he had been born in 1910. Our page on young Jacques Cousteau tells the story of his early life there and in Paris.

The last decade: loss and a second family

Cousteau’s personal life changed sharply in the years before his death.

His son Philippe, who had been expected to succeed him, had already died in 1979 when the seaplane he was piloting crashed on the Tagus River near Lisbon. Cousteau’s first wife, Simone Melchior, who had lived aboard Calypso for decades and was known to the crew as la Bergère, “the Shepherdess”, died in December 1990. In 1991 Cousteau married Francine Triplet, with whom he already had two children, Diane, born in 1980, and Pierre-Yves, born in 1982. The revelation that he had a second family during his marriage to Simone shocked many people and strained relations with his older son, Jean-Michel. We cover the family in more detail in Jacques Cousteau’s wife and family.

Antarctica, Rio and the rights of future generations

In his last years Cousteau threw himself into environmental campaigning on a global scale.

His biggest victory concerned Antarctica. In the late 1980s, nations were negotiating rules that could have opened the continent to mining. Cousteau campaigned against it, collecting millions of signatures on a petition and lobbying governments, alongside other environmental groups. In 1991, the Antarctic Treaty nations agreed the Madrid Protocol on environmental protection, which designated Antarctica as a natural reserve devoted to peace and science and banned mineral resource activities. Cousteau was widely credited with helping turn opinion. He also attended the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro and campaigned for a declaration of the rights of future generations, arguing that people not yet born have a right to an unpolluted planet.

These campaigns show the shift in Cousteau’s life from explorer to advocate, a shift that had been under way since the 1960s. You can follow it in our page on Cousteau’s accomplishments.

The sinking of Calypso and a fight over the family name

Two blows in 1996 darkened his final year.

In January 1996, Calypso, his famous research ship, was hit by a barge in Singapore harbour and sank. She was raised, but she never sailed under her own power again, and her later history was a long, sad story of disputes over ownership and restoration; see our page on Calypso. Cousteau had been planning a successor ship, Calypso II, but it was never completed.

The same year, Cousteau took his son Jean-Michel to court in France over the use of the Cousteau name for a resort in Fiji. A court ruled that Jean-Michel could not use the name in that way without clearly distinguishing it from his father’s organisation. The case was widely reported and was a painful end to a long working relationship between father and son. After his father’s death, Jean-Michel went on to found his own conservation organisation, Ocean Futures Society, and the resort in Fiji continues under his name; our page on the Cousteau name in Fiji covers that story. Since I have dived Fiji, at Lautoka and Dravuni, it’s a part of the Cousteau story I find interesting on a personal level.

How he was remembered in 1997

The tributes in 1997 were overwhelmingly warm, but they also reflected a more complicated picture than the friendly captain in the red cap.

Most obituaries focused on the Aqua-Lung, the films and the television series, and on his role in turning the public toward ocean conservation. Scientists were more mixed. Some argued that Cousteau was a brilliant filmmaker, inventor and communicator rather than a research scientist, and that his films sometimes staged scenes or blurred the line between documentary and drama. Others pointed out that his organisations had funded and supported real research, and that no scientist of his era did as much to make ordinary people care about the sea. Both views can be true at once.

Biographies published after his death, especially Brad Matsen’s Jacques Cousteau: The Sea King, filled in the less flattering parts of the story: the second family, the disputes over money and control of his organisations, the early films that would never be made today. Read alongside his own books, they give a fuller picture of a man who was ambitious, difficult and hugely influential. Our list of Cousteau’s books includes both his own writing and the main biographies.

For me, the measure of his life is simple. When he started diving there was no such thing as recreational scuba. When he died, millions of people around the world had learned to dive, and many of them, like me, had come to care deeply about reefs because of what they saw underwater. That shift happened in one lifetime, and he was at the centre of it.

What happened after his death

Cousteau’s organisations carried on, and his family continued his work in several directions.

The Cousteau Society in the United States and its French counterpart, the Équipe Cousteau, were led by Francine Cousteau. Jean-Michel built Ocean Futures Society and continued making films. Grandchildren took up the family trade too: Fabien Cousteau spent 31 days living in the Aquarius undersea laboratory off Key Largo in 2014, a project described in our page on Mission 31, and Céline and Alexandra Cousteau have worked on expeditions, films and ocean advocacy.

His most lasting legacy, though, is in the water. The demand regulator he co-developed in 1943 is the ancestor of the equipment every recreational diver uses today, including me. Every dive I’ve made, from the drift walls of Cozumel to the shore sites of Bonaire, has been with gear that traces straight back to Cousteau and Gagnan. That is a better memorial than any monument, though there is one of those too: a bronze bust of Cousteau sits on the seabed at about 12 metres in the Cousteau Reserve off Guadeloupe, which is covered in our Guadeloupe diving guide.