She was a member of a group of five broadly similar battleships, along with Charles Martel, Jauréguiberry, Bouvet, and Masséna, which were ordered in response to the British Royal Sovereign class.

She spent the majority of her service life in the Northern and Mediterranean Squadrons of the French fleet, where she participated in extensive, annual maneuvers.

The first stage of the program was to be a group of four squadron battleships that were built to different designs but met the same basic characteristics, including armor, armament, and displacement.

[1] The basic design for the ships was based on the previous battleship Brennus, but instead of mounting the main battery all on the centerline, the ships used the lozenge arrangement of the earlier vessel Magenta, which moved two of the main battery guns to single turrets on the wings.

Though the program called for four ships to be built in the first year, five were ultimately ordered: Carnot, Charles Martel, Jauréguiberry, Bouvet, and Masséna.

[3] She and her half-sisters were disappointments in service; they generally suffered from stability problems, and Louis-Émile Bertin, the Director of Naval Construction in the late 1890s, referred to the ships as "chavirables" (prone to capsizing).

Her forecastle gave her a high freeboard forward, but her quarterdeck was cut down to the main deck level aft.

Her propulsion system was rated at 16,300 indicated horsepower (12,200 kW), which allowed the ship to steam at a speed of 17.8 knots (33.0 km/h; 20.5 mph) with forced draft.

[5][6] Carnot's main armament consisted of two Canon de 305 mm Modèle 1887 guns in two single-gun turrets, one each fore and aft.

Her secondary armament consisted of eight Canon de 138.6 mm Modèle 1888 guns, which were mounted in single turrets at the corners of the superstructure.

Her armament suite was rounded out by four 450 mm (18 in) torpedo tubes, two of which were submerged in the ship's hull, with the other two in trainable deck mounts.

Above the belt was a 12 cm (4.7 in) thick strake side armor that created a highly subdivided cofferdam to reduce the risk of flooding from battle damage.

[10] Immediately on entering service, she and her half-sisters Charles Martel and Jauréguiberry were sent to join the International Squadron that had been assembled beginning in February.

The entire French fleet, including Carnot, conducted extensive maneuvers in the Mediterranean in July and August of that year.

[18] In early 1914, the French Naval Minister Ernest Monis decided to discard Carnot, owing to the cost of maintaining the obsolete battleship, which was by then nearly twenty years old.