The ship spent the first few years of her career operating with the French Mediterranean Squadron, where she conducted training exercises.

In 1903, she began a decade of service with the Newfoundland and Iceland Naval Division, where she typically patrolled the fishing grounds from April to September before returning to France, where she would be decommissioned for the winter.

Lavoisier was attached to the 2nd Light Squadron in the English Channel at the start of World War I in August 1914, but she saw no action there.

In April 1919, Lavoisier was detached from the Syrian Division; decommissioned for the last time in August, she was struck from the Navy Directory in early 1920 and sold to ship breakers.

The plan called for a total of seventy cruisers for use in home waters and overseas in the French colonial empire.

[4] On 19 April, the ship received orders to join the Mediterranean Squadron, France's primary battle fleet, and take the place of the cruiser Cosmao.

She got underway with a partial crew on 28 April and arrived in Toulon on 3 May; there, she received her full complement by taking men from Cosmao.

Lavoisier remained in the unit in 1899, which passed uneventfully, apart from having been sent to represent France at a sail regatta at Monaco on 13 March.

[7] On 6 March, Lavoisier joined several pre-dreadnought battleships and the cruisers Du Chayla, Cassard, and Galilée for maneuvers off Golfe-Juan on the Côte d'Azur, including night firing training.

On 24 March, she collided with the British merchant vessel Puritan, and though Lavoisier was not determined to be at fault in the accident, the French Navy agreed to pay for repairs.

Lavoisier was scheduled to receive bilge keels to correct her tendency to roll excessively, but the work was postponed to allow her to conduct exercises with the rest of the fleet in July.

[7] Lavoisier was ordered on 7 January 1903 to take the place of the protected cruiser Isly, which was then the flagship of the Newfoundland and Iceland Naval Division.

After arriving on 23 May, she began fishery protection duties, which were conducted in conjunction with British Royal Navy vessels in the area.

[7] The ship was ordered to return to North American waters as the station flagship on 25 January 1904 and she was recommissioned on 29 March.

In July, she made a stop at Cap-Rouge, Canada, after a confrontation between French and Canadian fishing vessels in the area.

She operated out of the port for the next three months, and during that period, her crew assisted in the construction of a hospital and a radio station in Reykjavík.

She carried a group of French Parliament members from Rochefort to Lorient on 21–22 September, and four days later, she departed for Tangier, Morocco.

From there, she carried the French ambassador to Norway on a series of visits to Ålesund, Molde, Hammerfest, Narvik, and Trondheim that lasted from 4 to 29 July.

During this period, on 12 July, while Lavoisier met the yacht of the German Kaiser Wilhelm II, Hohenzollern, in Bergen.

As with the previous year, she patrolled off Iceland from April to late June, after which she made another visit to Norway, once again with the French ambassador aboard.

[12] On 4 March 1912, the ship departed Rochefort for another tour off Iceland, stopping in Cherbourg and Bergen, coaling and taking on supplies at the latter port.

Over the course of the following four months, she made stops in Salé, Casablanca, Mogador, and Safi, Morocco, and Gibraltar before returning to Rochefort on 18 December.

The ship was recommissioned again in March 1914 and departed on 4 April for what was to be her final peacetime voyage to the North Atlantic fisheries.

[12] With the opening of hostilities, Lavoisier was assigned to the 2nd Light Squadron, which at that time consisted of the armored cruisers Marseillaise, Amiral Aube, Jeanne d'Arc, Gloire, Gueydon, and Dupetit-Thouars.

[12] Over the course of 1915, the French gradually withdrew vessels from the unit, and Lavoisier was transferred to the Mediterranean on 17 December to join the main fleet.

She stopped at Bizerte in French Tunisia on 23 December en route to the eastern Mediterranean, Malta three days later, and Port Said, Egypt, on the 30th.

Between 6 January 1916 and 6 February, she made a series of voyages between Malta and the main fleet anchorage at Corfu in the Ionian Sea.

She conducted patrol operations from January to June, thereafter being transferred to the Syrian Naval Division, which was based at Port Said.