French cruiser Guichen (1897)

Guichen
Class overview
Operators	French Navy
Preceded by	D'Entrecasteaux
Succeeded by	Châteaurenault
History
France
Name	Guichen
Builder	Ateliers et Chantiers de la Loire
Laid down	May 1896
Launched	26 October 1897
Completed	10 October 1898
Commissioned	9 March 1900
Decommissioned	March 1921
Stricken	29 November 1921
Fate	Broken up
General characteristics
Type	Protected cruiser
Displacement	8,151 long tons (8,282 t)
Length	133 m (436 ft 4 in) long overall
Beam	16.71 m (54 ft 10 in)
Draft	7.5 m (24 ft 7 in)
Installed power	36 × water-tube boilers 25,000 indicated horsepower (19,000 kW)
Propulsion	3 × triple-expansion steam engines 3 × screw propellers
Speed	23.5 knots (43.5 km/h; 27.0 mph)
Armament	2 × 164 mm (6.5 in) guns 6 × 138 mm (5.4 in) guns 10 × 47 mm (1.9 in) guns 5 × 37 mm (1.5 in) guns 2 × 450 mm (17.7 in) torpedo tubes
Armor	Deck: 40 to 100 mm (1.6 to 3.9 in) Conning tower: 160 mm (6.3 in) Gun shields: 55 mm (2.2 in)

Guichen was a large protected cruiser built in the 1890s for the French Navy, the only member of her class. She was intended to serve as a long-range commerce raider, designed according to the theories of the Jeune École, which favored a strategy of attacking Britain's extensive merchant shipping network instead of engaging in an expensive naval arms race with the Royal Navy. As such, Guichen was built with a relatively light armament of just eight medium-caliber guns, but was given a long cruising range and the appearance of a large passenger liner, which would help her to evade detection while raiding merchant shipping.

The predicted Anglo-French war that spurred Guichen's design never came, and so her early career passed uneventfully. She initially served with the Mediterranean Squadron during her lengthy sea trials, followed by a stint in the Northern Squadron. She was sent to the Far East in response to the Boxer Uprising in Qing China by early 1901, returning to France the following year. Another deployment to East Asian waters came in 1905 and ended in 1907 with her return to France. She had been reduced to reserve by 1911 and saw little further activity in the following three years.

At the start of World War I in July 1914, the ship was mobilized into the 2nd Light Squadron and tasked with patrolling the western end of the English Channel. Guichen was transferred to the Mediterranean Sea in May 1915, serving initially with the main French fleet that blockaded the Austro-Hungarian Navy in the Adriatic Sea. Later in the year, she was reassigned to the Syrian Division that patrolled the coast of Ottoman Syria, where she helped to evacuate some 4,000 Armenian civilians fleeing the Armenian genocide. By 1917, she had been reduced to a fast transport operating between Italy and Greece. After the war, she continued transport duties, but after her crew mutinied in 1919, she was recalled to France, where she was eventually struck from the naval register in 1921 and broken up.