Jean Bart was a French fast battleship, the second and final member of the . Built as a response to the Italian , the Richelieus were based on their immediate predecessors of the with the same unconventional arrangement that grouped their main battery forward in two quadruple gun turrets. They were scaled up to accommodate a much more powerful main battery of eight guns (compared to the guns of the Dunkerques), with increased armor to protect them from guns of the same caliber. Jean Bart was laid down in 1936 and was launched in 1940, following the outbreak of World War II in Europe. The ship was not complete by the time Germany won the Battle of France, and Jean Bart was rushed to Casablanca to escape advancing German troops. She had only one of her main turrets installed, along with a handful of anti-aircraft guns.
While in Casablanca, the French attempted to prepare the ship for action as much as was possible in light of limited infrastructure and the necessary parts to complete the vessel. Her anti-aircraft armament was slowly strengthened as guns became available and a search radar was fitted in 1942. In November, American and British forces invaded French North Africa in Operation Torch; Jean Bart initially helped to resist the attack, engaging in a gunnery duel with the battleship before being badly damaged by American dive bombers. Following the defection of French forces in the region to the Allied side, the French attempted to have the ship completed in the United States, but the requests came to nothing as the US Navy had no interest in the project. Jean Bart was accordingly repaired as much as possible in Casablanca, thereafter spending the rest of the war as a training ship there.
In 1945, discussions as to the fate of the ship considered converting her into an aircraft carrier, finishing her as a battleship, or discarding her altogether. The decision was ultimately made to finish her as a battleship, a process that took several years. Most work on the ship was completed by 1955, when she formally entered active service, and she conducted two overseas cruises to visit Denmark and the United States shortly thereafter. For the first and last time of either of their careers, Richelieu and Jean Bart cruised together on 30 January 1956. Jean Bart took part in the French intervention in the Suez Crisis in November 1956, including a brief four-shot bombardment of Port Said. Reduced to reserve in August 1957, she was used as a barracks ship until 1961. She remained, unused, in the French Navy's inventory until 1970 when she was struck from the naval register and sold for scrap.
Design
When in 1934 Italy announced that it would begin building two s armed with guns, the French Navy immediately began preparations to counter them. The small s that had been ordered provided the template for the next French battleship design, but it needed to be scaled up to match the new Italian vessels, both in terms of offensive and defensive characteristics. The design staff considered 380 and guns, but the latter could not be incorporated in a design that remained within the limit imposed by the Washington Naval Treaty and was quickly discarded. The Dunkerques carried their armament in two quadruple gun turrets arrayed in a superfiring pair forward of the superstructure, and the designers experimented with other arrangements, including combinations of triple and twin turrets, but the need to minimize the length of the armor belt (and thus its weight) necessitated a repetition of the Dunkerque layout.
Jean Bart displaced standard and fully loaded, with an overall length of , a beam of and a maximum draft of . She was powered by four Parsons geared steam turbines and six oil-fired Sural water-tube boilers, which developed a total of and yielded a maximum speed of . At a cruising speed of , the ship could steam for . Her crew numbered 1,569 officers and men. The ship carried four Loire 130 seaplanes on the fantail, and the aircraft facilities consisted of a steam catapult and a crane to handle the floatplanes.
