In thirty years, from her first dreadnought battleship, Courbet, started late, in to the Jean Bart and Gascogne project in , France only had produced four classes of battleships, the Courbet, Bretagne, Dunkerque, and Richelieu, transitioning from dreadnought to super dreadnought, and semi-battlecruiser to fast battleship, respectively.
Each iteration brought innovations in concept and design. In , the French capital ship force was in Europe only second to Great Britain, dwarfing the Kriegsmarine and a serious threat to the Regia Marina in the Mediterranean. The defeat on land, soon after Italy declared on France in June , put forward the question of its fate.
Churchill was certainly not at ease thinking what the Germans could have done with the Richelieu, or complete the Jean Bart. Pagemarker of all the French Battleships in service in , from the old schoolship Condorcet, to the rebuilt Jean Bart in Jean Bart and the cruisers Suffren and Montcalm in the s.
This story ended in tragedy in Mers-El Kebir, seeing the Bretagne blewing up, Provence and Dunkerque badly damaged, and Strasbourg escaping though a barrage of fire and magnetic mines. Richelieu was also attacked in Dakar, Jean Bart escaped to North Africa, and others were interned and disarmed.
Sadly, the mass scuttling of Toulon in November completed the destruction, leaving in only one truly active French battleship, but the most impressive: Richelieu, which after a modernization in the USA went on soldiering in the far east with the Free French Naval Forces and Royal Navy.
