Like many late pre-dreadnought designs, Justice was completed after the revolutionary British battleship HMS Dreadnought had entered service, rendering her obsolescent.

By April 1919, war-weary crews demanded to return to France, leading to quickly suppressed mutinies on Justice and two other battleships.

[2] Justice's main battery consisted of four 305 mm (12 in) Modèle 1893/96 guns mounted in two twin-gun turrets, one forward and one aft of the superstructure.

The secondary battery consisted of ten 194 mm (7.6 in) Modèle 1902 guns; six were mounted in single turrets, and four in casemates in the hull.

Instead, the navy found that tanks on either side of the vessel could be flooded to induce a heel of 2 degrees, increasing the maximum range of the guns from 12,500 to 13,500 m (13,700 to 14,800 yd).

[5] This was over a year after the revolutionary British battleship HMS Dreadnought entered service, which had rendered pre-dreadnoughts like Justice outdated.

On 30 December, Justice, Vérité, and the destroyers Carquois and Fanfare carried relief aid to Messina, Sicily to help survivors of an earthquake there.

The ships then steamed north to La Pallice, where they conducted tests with their wireless sets and gunnery training in Quiberon Bay.

Justice and the rest of 1st Squadron and the armored cruisers Ernest Renan and Léon Gambetta went on a cruise in the western Mediterranean in May and June, visiting a number of ports including Cagliari, Bizerte, Bône, Philippeville, Algiers, and Bougie.

Admiral Augustin Boué de Lapeyrère inspected both battleship squadrons in Golfe-Juan from 2 to 12 July, after which the ships cruised first to Corsica and then to Algeria.

The 2nd Squadron departed Toulon on 23 August with the armored cruisers Jules Ferry and Edgar Quinet and two destroyer flotillas to conduct training exercises in the Atlantic.

While en route to Brest, the ships stopped in Tangier, Royan, Le Verdon, La Pallice, Quiberon Bay, and Cherbourg.

[16] After completing repairs, Justice returned to Les Salins in early 1914, where she and the other 2nd Squadron ships conducted torpedo training on 19 January.

Accordingly, Justice and the rest of the 2nd Squadron were sent to Algiers, where they joined a group of seven passenger ships that had a contingent of 7,000 troops from XIX Corps aboard.

Boué de Lapeyrère then took the fleet into the Adriatic in an attempt to force a battle with the Austro-Hungarian fleet; the following morning, the British and French cruisers spotted vessels in the distance that, on closing with them, turned out to be the Austro-Hungarian protected cruiser SMS Zenta and the torpedo boat Ulan, which were trying to blockade the coast of Montenegro.

In the ensuing Battle of Antivari, Boué de Lapeyrère initially ordered his battleships to fire warning shots, but this caused confusion among the fleet's gunners that allowed Ulan to escape.

On 1 September, the French battleships bombarded Austrian fortifications at Cattaro in an attempt to draw out the Austro-Hungarian fleet, which again refused to take the bait.

[21][22][23] The fleet continued these operations in October and November, including a sweep off the coast of Montenegro to cover a group of merchant vessels replenishing their coal there.

The patrols continued through late December, when an Austro-Hungarian U-boat torpedoed Jean Bart, leading to the decision by the French naval command to withdraw the main battle fleet from direct operations in the Adriatic.

[24][25] Justice and Démocratie were detached from the main fleet in January 1916 to reinforce the Dardanelles Division, though the Allies evacuated their forces fighting there that month.

The ships were tasked with pressuring the Greek government, which to that point had remained neutral, though King Constantine I's wife Sophie was the sister of the German Kaiser Wilhelm II.

The French and British were growing increasingly frustrated by Constantine's refusal to enter the war, and sent the 3rd Squadron to Salonika try to influence events in the country.

Several French ships sent men ashore in Athens on 1 December to support the coup, but they were quickly defeated by the royalist Greek Army.

In late October, members of the Central Powers began signing armistices with the British and French, signaling the end of the war.

[27][28] On 8 December, the French naval command ordered Justice to steam to Odessa to join the battleship Mirabeau, which was observing clashes between the communist Bolshevik and White forces during the Russian Civil War, part of the Allied intervention into the conflict.

Three days later, when the Bolshevik forces appeared ready to advance into the city, Justice, Mirabeau, and the armored cruiser Jules Michelet sent landing parties ashore to strengthen the White defenses.

On 1 January 1919, Justice had returned to Constantinople; by that time, the French fleet in the Black Sea had been designated the 2nd Squadron, and it also included Démocratie, the Danton-class ships Diderot and Vergniaud, and the dreadnought France.

The French squadron was thereafter tasked with supporting the White defenses of Sevastopol and blockading the coast of Ukraine, which had largely fallen into the control of the Bolsheviks.

The situation worsened after a group of Greek soldiers fired into a crowd of demonstrators ashore; one French sailor was killed and another five were injured.

Justice's crew was enraged, and began discussing opening fire on the Greek battleship Kilkis, moored nearby.