After entering service in 1899, Protet was sent to the Pacific Ocean for a lengthy deployment; she was to spend the majority of her active career in the region.

While there, she helped suppress a fire in the United States in 1900 and protected French interests in Colombia during a conflict in the country in 1901.

[4] Protet was built at the Forges et Chantiers de la Gironde shipyard near Bordeaux; she was ordered on 14 August 1895 and her keel was laid down on 5 November.

[8] She was placed in full commission on 20 April to be sent to the Far East; according to the contemporary Journal of the Royal United Service Institution, she was being sent to replace the old unprotected cruiser Duguay-Trouin,[9] but the modern historian Stephen Roberts indicates she was sent to relieve the old ironclad Duguesclin.

[3] Protet was still serving in the Naval Division of the Eastern Pacific by January 1901, which also included the gunboat Zélée and four transport vessels.

[12] In October that year, she went to Panama City, then still part of Colombia, to protect French interests during the Thousand Days' War; she met vessels from other navies, including the United States pre-dreadnought battleship USS Iowa and the British sloop HMS Icarus.

On the Caribbean side of the isthmus of Panama, at Colón, the French cruiser Suchet and the United States gunboat USS Machias also awaited developments in the conflict.

[13] In December, Protet steamed north to the United States' Mare Island Naval Shipyard in California to replenish coal and supplies.

[18] Later that year, Protet was recalled to France, and by late May, she had reached Dakar in French West Africa, where she was relieved by her sister ship Catinat.

The naval command decided that the cost of repairs was too high, given her weakness compared to foreign contemporaries, and she was accordingly left idle until 1 March 1909, when she was decommissioned at Rochefort.