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The French Navy was in considerable disarray at the end of World War II. Little remained of the powerful fleet with which the nation had begun the war. Two battleships, the Richelieu and the incomplete Jean Bart, and a few cruisers, destroyers, and submarines had escaped the German occupation of France in 1940. Most of […]

The French navy had emerged from the nineteenth century with what was contemptuously dubbed “a fleet of samples,” the reflection of a confused naval policy resulting from the constant turmoil caused by politics or surrounding the debate over the theories of the Jeune École. The French had seemed on the road to recovery with the […]

In 1914 the French Navy consisted of 690,000 tons of combatant ships in commission, with an additional 257,000 tons under construction. At the time of the Washington Treaty of 1922, the combat fleet totalled only 485,000 tons in commission and a mere 25,000 tons under construction—an obvious indication that even obsolete ships were not being […]