At the outbreak of World War I in August 1914, Edgar Quinet participated in the hunt for the German battlecruiser SMS Goeben and then joined the blockade of the Austro-Hungarian Navy in the Adriatic.

Converted into a training ship in the mid-1920s, Edgar Quinet ran aground on a rock off the Algerian coast on 4 January 1930 and sank five days later.

The two Edgar Quinet-class cruisers proved to be the last major warships of the French fleet to rely on reciprocating machinery for their propulsion systems.

The goal of the blockade was to prevent Serbian reinforcements from supporting the siege at Scutari, where Montenegro had besieged a combined force of Albanians and Ottomans.

Pressured by the international blockade, Serbia withdrew its army from Scutari, which was subsequently occupied by a joint Allied ground force.

[8] Edgar Quinet and the armored cruisers Ernest Renan and Jules Michelet were mobilized as the First Light Division and tasked with hunting down the German battlecruiser SMS Goeben and her consort Breslau.

[9] These ships, along with a flotilla of twelve destroyers, were to steam to Philippeville on 4 August, but the German cruisers had bombarded the port the previous day.

This attack, coupled with reports that suggested the Germans would try to break out of the Mediterranean into the Atlantic, prompted the French high command to send Edgar Quinet and the First Light Division further west, to Algiers.

[9] The fleet, commanded by Admiral Augustin Boué de Lapeyrère, had assembled by the night of 15 August; the following morning, it conducted a sweep into the Adriatic and encountered the Austro-Hungarian cruiser SMS Zenta.

[11] By the beginning of 1916, the fleet's modern armored cruisers had been organized into two units, the 1st and 2nd Light Divisions; Edgar Quinet served as the flagship of the former, which also included Waldeck-Rousseau and Ernest Renan.

[12] On 8 January, Edgar Quinet, Waldeck-Rousseau, Ernest Renan and Jules Ferry embarked a contingent of Chasseurs Alpins (mountain troops) to seize the Greek island of Corfu.

The work lasted until 1927, and included the reduction of her armament to ten of her 194 mm guns, the removal of two of her funnels and their boilers, and a reconstruction of her bridge.