Jean du Plessis de Grenédan

Jean Joseph Anne, comte du Plessis de Grenédan (1892–1923) was a French naval officer, who died on 21 or 22 December 1923 when the airship Dixmude, of which he was the commander, exploded over the Mediterranean Sea near Sicily.

Jean Joseph Anne-Marie du Plessis was born in Rennes on 15 January 1892 as the second son of a lawyer at the bar of Rennes, Count Joachim du Plessis de Grenédan. His father participated in the creation of the Catholic Faculty of Angers. Jean completed his high school, from the fifth class, at the Collège Saint-Maurille.

On October 5, 1907 he entered the 'Naval Course' preparatory to the Ecole Navale at the college of Vaugirard in Paris to prepare for the entrance exam to the National Naval School. Following the end of the preparatory classes at the Vaugirard college, in October 1908, he completed his second year of 'Naval Studies’ at the Lycée Saint-Louis where he was an external student. This school is a boarding school at Massillon, run by priests of the Oratory that provide further studies for advanced students. He was received at the forty-first College Intake in August 1909. He joined the naval school and embarked on the Borda, a school ship that housed the Naval Academy from 1840 to 1913, on September 30, 1909.

He passed twenty-first at the Naval School in July 1911.

From 1911-1912, he made a tour in the West Indies and a tour in the Mediterranean and Baltic on the cruiser Duguay-Troui.

He was commissioned in 1917 as an airship pilot, and he became famous as commander of the Dixmude, one of the two zeppelins given to France as war reparations, and especially by establishing world records on board. His disappearance in the Mediterranean Sea, aboard the Dixmude, on the 21 or 22 December 1923, gave rise to a considerable controversy.

The airship LZ 114 was, at the time, the largest airship in the world, 226 m (743 ft) long.

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