Carnot was a pre-dreadnought battleship of the French Navy. She was laid down in July 1891, launched in July 1894, and completed in July 1897. She was a member of a group of five broadly similar battleships, along with Charles Martel, Jauréguiberry, Bouvet, and Masséna, which were ordered in response to the British . Like her half-sisters, she was armed with a main battery of two guns and two guns in individual turrets. She had a top speed of .
Carnot had a fairly uneventful career. She spent the majority of her service life in the Northern and Mediterranean Squadrons of the French fleet, where she participated in extensive, annual maneuvers. She was withdrawn from service by the outbreak of World War I in August 1914, and so did not see action during the conflict. She remained in the French Navy's inventory until 1922, when she was stricken from the naval register and sold for scrap.
Design
In 1889, the British Royal Navy passed the Naval Defence Act that resulted in the construction of the eight s; this major expansion of naval power led the French government to pass its reply, the Statut Naval (Naval Law) of 1890. The law called for a total of twenty-four "cuirasses d'escadre" (squadron battleships) and a host of other vessels, including coastal defense battleships, cruisers, and torpedo boats. The first stage of the program was to be a group of four squadron battleships that were built to different designs but met the same basic characteristics, including armor, armament, and displacement. The naval high command issued the basic requirements on 24 December 1889; displacement would not exceed , the primary armament was to consist of and guns, the belt armor should be , and the ships should maintain a top speed of . The secondary battery was to be either or caliber, with as many guns fitted as space would allow.
The basic design for the ships was based on the previous battleship , but instead of mounting the main battery all on the centerline, the ships used the lozenge arrangement of the earlier vessel , which moved two of the main battery guns to single turrets on the wings. Although the navy had stipulated that displacement could be up to 14,000 tons, political considerations, namely parliamentary objections to increases in naval expenditures, led the designers to limit displacement to around . Five naval architects submitted proposals to the competition; the design for Carnot was prepared by Victor Saglio, the Sous-directeur des constructions navales (Under-director of Naval Construction) at Toulon. The navy accepted Saglio's proposal and ordered the ship on 10 September 1891. Though the program called for four ships to be built in the first year, five were ultimately ordered: Carnot, , , , and .
She and her half-sisters were disappointments in service; they generally suffered from stability problems, and Louis-Émile Bertin, the Director of Naval Construction in the late 1890s, referred to the ships as "chavirables" (prone to capsizing). All five of the vessels compared poorly to their British counterparts, particularly their contemporaries of the . The ships suffered from a lack of uniformity of equipment, which made them hard to maintain in service, and their mixed gun batteries comprising several calibers made gunnery in combat conditions difficult, since shell splashes were hard to differentiate. Many of the problems that plagued the ships in service were a result of the limitation on their displacement, particularly their stability and seakeeping.
General characteristics and machinery
Carnot was long between perpendiculars, and had a beam of and a draft of . She had a displacement of . Her forecastle gave her a high freeboard forward, but her quarterdeck was cut down to the main deck level aft. Her hull was given a marked tumblehome to give the 27 cm guns wide fields of fire. The ship was equipped with a heavy military foremast and a lighter pole mainmast.