French pre-dreadnought battleships from the period 1880-1906 are often cited online as the acme of ugly warship design, sporting pronounced tumblehome hulls, very low freeboard, and extremely heavy upper works. Why were they designed this way? Were these designs effective?

Part I

Although ugliness is in the eye of the beholder (in my opinion, French ships from this period have a Gothic steam age aesthetic that adds to their appeal), French battleship and predreadnought design of the latter quarter of the nineteenth century were the byproduct of an era that was under intense flux. Rapid technological changes, the maturation of older technology, and geopolitical shifts were all factors that the main design bureau for the French Navy, the Conseil des Travaux, wrestled with. Moreover, there were significant doctrinal shifts within the Navy that added to the naval architects' problems. The result was the very eclectic-looking ships of this period.

One of the problems facing the Conseil des Travaux was that this was a period in which new innovations in both naval architecture and warfare appeared. The torpedo, quick-firing guns, advances in smokeless powder, watertightness, and a whole host of other developments appeared, and there was no shortage of proponents who argued each new development was revolutionary. The response of the Navy to these developments was to try and incorporate all of them almost at once. Given the protracted development between design and construction, there as considerable down-time to modify the Conseil's designs and fit in whatever novelty. In a report to the British Admiralty in 1884 about French naval construction, Captain Henry Kane quoted an anonymous French officer who grumbled tartly:

it is impossible to know what one of our ships will be like when completed, but it is very easy to see what she will not be; look at the design on which they begin her construction.

While this anonymous Frenchman's complaint was a reflection of the rapid technological change that confused many contemporaneous naval professionals, it also illustrates the Conseil's propensity to tinker with designs. The autocratic leadership of Louis de Bussy in the Conseil encouraged a type of technological factionalism, which resulted spilled over into warship design. Unlike the British, who tended to build in homogeneous classes, the French Navy designed ships in small packets headed by a chief engineer.

The result of this process was that the French Navy tended to be early adapters of new technologies like all steel construction, but their designs often indicated a poor integration of these new innovations. The pronounced tumblehome of French ships was in no small measure a direct result of the Conseil architects cramming too much onto the decks and superstructures. The tumblehome imparted a degree of stability in regular operations but at the cost of overall stability of the battleship if hit. By the 1880s and 90s, some French officers were aware of this problem of the tumblehome and the top-heaviness of French ships. The battleship Magenta, for example, had a three-story "naval chateau" above the armor belt with multiple caliber guns, creating a heel of up to 12 degrees when the ship turned with her guns trained. Magenta's captain halfheartedly defended his ship, saying in a report to the Ministry of Marine:

a ship may only go into battle once in its life, and for thirty years it would be inactive. The superstructures, annoying during battle, notably improve habitability for ordinary life.

Magenta was arguably the nadir of French battleships in this period, being an all around poor design, but her many shortcomings was the culmination of a number of processes that influenced the Conseil that made the architects cram too much on a single hull.

One problem facing the Conseil was doctrinal. The French Navy of the nineteenth century was one of the foremost proponents of a guerre de course (war of the chase) style war on commerce. The Jeune Ecole (young school) of French naval thought looked at the hypothetical enemies facing France, most notably Britain, and decided the most efficient use of French naval power in a British-French war was to destroy British commerce. De Bussy's mentor, Dupuy de Lome, was one of the foremost exponents of this form of warfare, and de Bussy honored his mentor with what was arguably the world's first armored cruiser, the Dupuy de Lome. The influence of Jeune Ecole partisans within the Navy meant that the Conseil often had to look at issues of speed and efficient armament when contemplating new designs. Speedy cruisers were also expensive, and priority for battleship construction tended to suffer in the 1880s, further entrenching the French propensity for individual designs. But the powerful patrons of a guerre de course did not entirely eliminate the battleship from French naval planning. In addition to looking at Britain as a hypothetical enemy, the French also had to contend with the rise of the Regina Marina in Italy as a Mediterranean rival. Under the leadership of the skilled naval architect Benedetto Brin, the Italians launched a successive wave of innovative battleship designs that frightened both French and British naval planners. This meant that battleships still had a role to play in French naval appropriations as a Jeune Ecole-type fleet was less effective against Italy than it would be if used against the UK. Adding to the Conseil's tasks, the issue of both Germany and colonial defense also posed problems for planned naval construction. In the case of a Franco-German war, a blue-water fleet had very little utility and the nature of Germany's northern coastline made it easy to blockade. Therefore, anticipation coastal operations against what was one of France's main rivals was one of the main tasks for French naval planning. The growth in French overseas colonies also prompted the French Army to demand that the Navy protect convoys from French possessions carrying colonial troops for a European war. Moreover, the importance of guerre de course in French naval thinking meant French naval planners were more sensitive to their own vulnerabilities in their seaborne lines of communication. Fear of either Italian or British interference with troop convoys in the Mediterranean meant there was still a role for the battleship to play in French naval planning. Even though he was a convinced partisan of the Jeune Ecole, the late nineteenth-century Minister of Marine Theophile Aube argued that in case of hostilities:

Our naval force must be concentrated and constantly ready for the offensive, for the destruction of the enemy fleet will render everything else easy.

Not surprisingly, under Aube's leadership, the French still constructed a number of individual battleships despite the Minister's commitment to cruisers and torpedo boats.

The result of this doctrinal melange and multiple strategic priorities was that the late 1880s and 1890s were a period of great confusion in French naval architecture, with too many individual designs trying to do too much. This heterogeneous fleet was perhaps inevitable given the overall strategic situation France found herself in the aftermath of the Franco-Prussian War. The presence of both the Italian fleet and the strong British Mediterranean squadron discouraged the French from building a purely guerre de course style fleet. The French Navy also had to constantly justify its budget before the government and the Navy had to justify its utility in a conflict with Germany, thus encouraging a slower battlefleet. Consequently, the French Navy confronted the Dreadnought revolution with flat feet. In some ways, the French Navy was still quite competitive globally; its boilers were top-notch, as were French small and medium-caliber QF. Moreover, the Dreadnought was partly a response to fears of armored cruisers outgunning anything they could not outrun, which was a ship class pioneered by the French and the Russian disciples. But the French shift to turbines and all-big gun armament was slow and never fully completed until after the First World War, a tardiness that was partly a reflection of new political realities like the Entente, but also because of the increasing expense of dreadnoughts.

On the surface, the failure of the French-designed and inspired Russian fleet in the Russo-Japanese war vindicated the critics of French naval designs. Certainly, the affinity for top-heavy designs and tumblehome contributed to the Russian losses at Tsushima, but a closer examination of the conflict reveals a much more complex picture. The Baltic fleet was operating at a number of marked disadvantages unrelated to design which would undercut its efficacy at Tsushima. A homogeneous British-built fleet did not automatically deliver Togo victory at the earlier Battle of the Yellow Sea, and Witgeff's battleships acquitted themselves rather well. The Vladivostok squadron's cruisers also demonstrated that they could range against a modern opponent and use their speed to evade capture. Although the squadron's raids achieved little, they were a vexing problem for the IJN and the Russian cruisers were only caught when they made a poorly-coordinated gambit to break through to the Port Arthur Pacific Fleet. Russian battle experience showed some aspects of French design and doctrine worked, and others failed in sometimes catastrophic ways.