Jean Bart was the second of four s, the first dreadnoughts built for the French Navy. She was completed before World War I as part of the 1910 naval building programme. She spent the war in the Mediterranean and helped to sink the Austro-Hungarian protected cruiser on 16 August 1914. She was torpedoed by an Austro-Hungarian submarine in December and steamed to Malta for repairs that required three and a half months. She spent the rest of the war providing cover for the Otranto Barrage that blockaded the Austro-Hungarian Navy in the Adriatic Sea and sometimes served as a flagship.
After the war, she and her sister ship participated in the occupation of Constantinople and were then sent to the Black Sea in 1919 to support Allied troops in the Southern Russia Intervention. Jean Barts war-weary crew briefly mutinied, but it was easily put down and she returned to France mid-year. She was partially modernised twice during the 1920s, but was deemed to be in too poor condition to be refitted again in the 1930s. Therefore, she became a training ship in 1934 and was then disarmed and hulked as an accommodation ship in 1935–1936 in Toulon. The Germans captured her intact when they occupied Toulon in 1942 and used her for testing large shaped charge warheads. She was sunk by Allied bombing in 1944, and after the war ended, was refloated and scrapped beginning in late 1945.
Background and description
By 1909, the French Navy was convinced of the superiority of the all-big-gun battleship like over the mixed-calibre designs like the which had preceded the Courbets. The following year, the new Minister of the Navy, Augustin Boué de Lapeyrère, selected a design that was comparable to the foreign dreadnoughts then under construction, to be built as part of the 1906 Naval Programme. The ships were long overall and had a beam of and a mean draught of . They displaced at normal load and at deep load. Their crew numbered 1,115 men as a private ship and increased to 1,187 when serving as a flagship. The ships were powered by two licence-built Parsons steam turbine sets, each driving two propeller shafts using steam provided by 24 Belleville boilers. These boilers were coal-burning with auxiliary oil sprayers and were designed to produce . The ships had a designed speed of . The Courbet-class ships carried enough coal and fuel oil to give them a range of at a speed of .
The main battery of the Courbet class consisted of twelve Canon de Mle 1906–1910 guns mounted in six twin-gun turrets, with two pairs of superfiring turrets fore and aft of the superstructure, and a pair of wing turrets amidships. Their secondary armament was twenty-two Canon de Mle 1910 guns, which were mounted in casemates in the hull. Four Canon de Mle 1902 Hotchkiss guns were fitted, two on each broadside in the superstructure. They were also armed with four submerged torpedo tubes, a pair on each broadside, and could stow 10 mines below decks. The ships' waterline belt ranged in thickness from and was thickest amidships. The gun turrets were protected by of armour and plates protected the casemates. The curved armoured deck was thick on the flat and on the outer slopes. The conning tower had thick face and sides.
Construction and career
Jean Bart was ordered on 11 August 1910 and named after the privateer Jean Bart. She was laid down on 15 November 1910 at the Arsenal de Brest and launched on 22 September 1911. The ship was completed on 2 September 1913 at a cost of F60,200,000 and visited Dunkerque, the birthplace of her namesake on 18 September. She was commissioned into the fleet on 19 November together with her sister . They were assigned to the 1st Battle Division () of the 1st Battle Squadron () of the 1st Naval Army (), at Toulon in mid-November. Jean Bart steamed to Brest on 24 June 1914 to rendezvous with her sister France, who had not yet finished her trials. Raymond Poincaré, President of the French Republic, boarded France on 16 July for a state visit to Saint Petersburg, Russia. After encountering the battlecruisers of the German I Scouting Group in the Baltic Sea en route, the ships arrived at Kronstadt on 20 July. They made a port visit to Stockholm, Sweden, on 25–26 July, but a planned visit to Copenhagen, Denmark, was cancelled due to rising tensions between Austria-Hungary and Serbia and the ships arrived at Dunkerque on 29 July.