The ship was in use from 1920 as a running mate with Lutetia on the route Bordeaux – Vigo – Lisbon – Rio de Janeiro – Santos – Montevideo – Buenos Aires.

[4] In 1922 Marcelo Torcuato de Alvear, then Argentinian ambassador in France, sailed on Massilia when he was recalled to become President of Argentina.

In 1928 an Italian migrant to Brazil, Giuseppe Pistone, strangled his wife, Maria Mercedes Féa, and tried to send her partly-dismembered body from Santos to Europe hidden in a suitcase aboard Massilia.

When she left La Rochelle on 19 October 1939 she carried 384 passengers fleeing Europe, of which the largest contingent were Spanish Republicans who had previously taken refuge in France.

[6] Amongst those aboard were the writer, playwright and copyist Salvador Valverde; the journalist, writer and editor Arturo Cuadrado Moure; the lawyer and author José Ruiz del Toro; the former parliamentarian of the Izquierda Republicana, Elpidio Villaverde; the painter and set designer Gregorio (Gori) Muñoz Montoro; the author Elena Fortún and her husband the painter and military officer Eusebio de Gorbea y Lemmi; the lawyer and legislator Pedro Coromines Muntanya;[7] the sculptor Alberto López Barral; the academic Wenceslao Roces; the painter, set designer and ceramicist Manuel Ángeles Ortiz; the academic Ramón Martínez López; the graphic artists Andrés Dameson[8] and Mauro Cristobal Artache; the painters Ramón Hidalgo Pontones and Esteban Francés Cabrera; the film director Luis de la Fuente; the playwrights Manuel Desco Sanz and Pascual Guillén; the journalists Antonio Salgado y Salgado, Clemente Cimorra, Mariano Perla, and Miguel A. Carreta; the engineer José Arbex Pomareta; the military pilot Juan Aboal Aboal; the film-maker José Fernández Cañizares; the actors Severino Mejuto and Ángel Giménez; the actress Maricarmen García Antón; the medical doctors Manuel Conde López and Miguel Cadenas Rubio; and the professor Carmen Santaolalla.

It then became a naval school for Chargeurs Réunis moored in the Étang de Berre, and then as a floating barracks for German troops in Marseille.