List of battleships of France

These were experimental ships, built to different designs but all to the same broad specifications; they were all characterized by pronounced tumblehome and a lozenge arrangement of a mixed-caliber main battery.

During the war, the bulk of the French fleet was occupied with guarding the southern end of the Adriatic Sea to contain the Austro-Hungarian Navy, while older vessels were used elsewhere, particularly during the Dardanelles campaign, where Bouvet was sunk in 1915.

[10] The basic design for the first ship, Charles Martel, was also prepared by Huin, who based it on Brennus, though the armament was arranged in the lozenge layout that had been used on a number of older ironclad battleships like the Magenta class.

Compared to Charles Martel, Carnot was broadly similar, with the same main battery, though she had a smaller superstructure in an attempt to minimize topweight and thus instability that plagued many French capital ships during this period.

Capitán Prat's secondary battery was mounted in twin-gun turrets to save weight and space, and Lagane adopted that innovation for Jauréguiberry, the first time such an arrangement was used on a French battleship.

[39] Hulked in 1915,[40] Masséna was ultimately scuttled in November 1915 to form a breakwater to protect the vessels that evacuated the Allied army that had been defeated in the Gallipoli campaign.

During the battle, Bouvet was heavily engaged by Ottoman artillery, suffered eight hits, but had neutralized one fortress's guns before she struck a naval mine that caused uncontrolled flooding.

The naval command accepted the growth of the design and in 1893 selected the proposal prepared by Jules Thibaudier, the director of the Arsenal de Rochefort shipyard, with construction beginning on the first of three vessels later that year.

[53] The Board of Construction requested an improved version of the Charlemagne class in 1897, which was to correct the stability problems that perennially plagued French battleships of the period.

As a result, Thibaudier was constrained in what he could accomplish with the design, and so he considered improvements to stability, the caliber and arrangement of the secondary battery, and the armor layout of the hull.

He considered the use of twin-gun turrets for the secondary battery, but concerns over the risk that damage would disable two guns rather than just one and the arrangement for effective fields of fire led the command to reject them.

Requests from the various technical sections of the French Navy for increased ammunition storage, improved armor for the secondary battery, and accommodations for a flag officer and his staff complicated Thibaudier's task.

Like many late French pre-dreadnoughts, their lengthy design and construction periods resulted in their completion after the revolutionary British "all-big-gun" battleship HMS Dreadnought.

Ironically, Bertin had suggested the exact same caliber during the initial design process, which the General Staff rejected over fears that the rate of fire would fall.

Pressure from Parliament to keep technological pace with foreign navies led the designers to adopt steam turbines, the first time they were used in French capital ships.

Like the rest of the fleet, they escorted convoys from North Africa at the start of the war and then went to the Adriatic, seeing action at the Battle of Antivari, with the exception of Mirabeau, which was being refitted in Toulon at the time.

The ships operated with the main fleet during the conflict and saw little activity after the Battle of Antivari; they suffered the same fate as the Dantons, with crews being thinned to provide men for more important vessels.

Courbet remained in service as a training vessel early in World War II and she shelled German forces during the Battle of France in June 1940 before fleeing to Britain and eventually being sunk as a breakwater for the Normandy invasion.

Design work began before the Courbets had been ordered, and the emphasis was on increasing the caliber of the main battery to match foreign development of the so-called superdreadnought type such as the British Orion class.

The ships spent the 1920s and 1930s in the Mediterranean and Atlantic Squadrons, undergoing periodic refits and modernizations, and in the late 1930s, they took part in the non-intervention patrols off Spain during the Spanish Civil War.

Work on the next design began in early 1912 and three initial versions were prepared; the first was essentially a repeat of Bretagne but the other two attempted a radical solution to the problem identified by the Technical Committee.

Additionally, the French expected to be fighting at ranges where the existing 340 mm gun was able to defeat heavy armor, so there was little need to step up to the larger caliber.

All members of the treaty system were barred from building battleships for a decade, apart from France and Italy, both of which had 70,000 long tons (71,000 t) allotted, since their fleets consisted of older vessels.

The navy initially conceived of small, fast battleships to counter new Italian heavy cruisers that threatened France's lines of communication in the Mediterranean.

Concerned that the Germans would seize the French fleet, the British launched Operation Catapult to neutralize the vessels; during the attack on Mers-el-Kébir, Force H damaged Dunkerque but Strasbourg was able to escape the harbor and reach Toulon.

[111][112] The Italian response to the Dunkerques, the first two Littorio-class battleships, which displaced 35,000 long tons (36,000 t) and were armed with nine 380 mm guns, prompted France to respond in kind.

Beginning construction of the ships in late 1935 placed France in violation of the naval arms treaty, as the total tonnage exceeded the 70,000 tons allowed before the building holiday expired in 1936.

In November 1942, the Allies invaded French North Africa and Jean Bart initially fired on the invasion fleet before being disabled by the US battleship Massachusetts.

The navy settled on the first version, as the second variation would have introduced a fourth shell caliber to the fleet, thus complicating logistics, and the third design was too large and expensive.

Two ships were authorized in April 1940, with construction to begin in 1941 after the aircraft carrier Joffre was launched, but following the French collapse in June, the program was cancelled.