Liberté-class battleship

The Liberté class consisted of four pre-dreadnought battleships built for the French Navy in the early 1900s. The class comprised Liberté, Justice, Vérité, and Démocratie. They were ordered as part of a naval expansion program directed at countering German warship construction authorized by the German Naval Law of 1898; the French program called for six new battleships, which began with the two République-class battleships. During construction of the first two vessels, foreign adoption of heavier secondary batteries prompted the French to re-design the last four members to carry a secondary battery of 194 mm (7.6 in) guns, producing the Liberté class. Like the Républiques, their main armament consisted of four 305 mm (12 in) guns in two twin-gun turrets, and they had the same top speed of 18 knots (33 km/h; 21 mph).

Their peacetime careers were largely uneventful, consisting of a normal routine of training exercises, visits to various French and foreign ports, and naval reviews for French politicians and foreign dignitaries. In 1909, Liberté, Justice, and Vérité visited the United States during the Hudson–Fulton Celebration. Liberté was destroyed by an accidental explosion of unstable propellant charges in Toulon in 1911, prompting the fleet to enact strict handling controls to prevent further accidents. The three surviving ships were deployed to guard troop convoys from North Africa to France in the early days of World War I, thereafter deploying to the Adriatic Sea in an attempt to bring the Austro-Hungarian Navy to battle. The fleet sank an Austro-Hungarian cruiser in the Battle of Antivari but was otherwise unsuccessful in its attempt to engage the Austro-Hungarians. Vérité was briefly deployed to the Dardanelles in September 1914, where she bombarded Ottoman coastal defenses.

In 1916, the ships were sent to Greece to put pressure on the still-neutral government to join the war on the side of the Allies. The French ultimately intervened in a coup that overthrew the Greek king and brought the country into the war. The ships thereafter spent much of the rest of the war at Corfu, where they saw little activity owing to coal shortages. Following the Allied victory, Justice and Démocratie were sent to the Black Sea to oversee the demilitarization of Russian warships German forces had seized during the war, and Vérité went to Constantinople to oversee the Ottoman surrender. All three ships were recalled in mid-1919, and Vérité was decommissioned immediately thereafter. The other two ships were deactivated in 1920. All three were sold for scrap in 1921 and broken up in Italy or Germany. Liberté, still on the bottom of Toulon's harbor, was raised in 1925 and scrapped there.