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

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 armour, armament, and displacement.

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

[3] Masséna introduced the three-shaft arrangement for battleship propulsion systems; all previous capital ships used two steam engines.

She and her half-sisters nevertheless 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).

[5][6] Masséna had three vertical triple expansion engines each driving a single screw, with steam supplied by twenty-four Lagrafel d'Allest water-tube boilers.

With only two-thirds of her boilers operating for more economic cruising, these figures fell to 9,780 metric horsepower (9,650 ihp) and 15.49 kn (28.69 km/h; 17.83 mph), respectively.

[6][7] Masséna's main armament consisted of two Canon de 305 mm Modèle 1893 guns in two single-gun turrets, one each fore and aft.

[10][11] Her secondary armament consisted of eight Canon de 138.6 mm Modèle 1891 guns, which were mounted in manually operated single turrets at the corners of the superstructure with 160° arcs of fire.

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

[6][12] Masséna was laid down at the Ateliers et Chantiers de la Loire shipyard in September 1892 and launched nearly three years later on 24 July 1895.

[16] In June and July that year, she participated in extensive joint maneuvers conducted with the Mediterranean Squadron; she was still Ménard's flagship during this period.

[19] During her period in the Reserve Division, Masséna was manned with a reduced crew that would be completed with naval reservists if the vessel needed to be activated for maneuvers or to take the place of a front-line battleship during a refit.

[20] On 13 January 1908, she joined the battleships République, Patrie, Gaulois, Charlemagne, Saint Louis, and Jauréguiberry for a cruise in the Mediterranean, first to Golfe-Juan and then to Villefranche-sur-Mer, where the squadron stayed for a month.

[21] Early in 1914, the French Naval Minister Ernest Monis decided to discard Masséna, owing to the cost of maintaining the obsolete battleship, which was by then more than fifteen years old.

[5] That year, the Triple Entente had launched an invasion at Gallipoli in an attempt to capture Constantinople, knock the Ottoman Empire out of the war, and open a route to supply Russia via the Dardanelles.

Too old for active service, Masséna did not take part in the ensuing Gallipoli Campaign, which had stalled by the end of 1915, having made no significant progress.

Masséna was towed from Toulon to Cape Helles on the Gallipoli Peninsula late in 1915, and scuttled there on 9 November to form a breakwater to protect the evacuation effort that withdrew the Allied expeditionary force in January 1916.