List of protected cruisers of France

Over the 1880s and 1890s, the French Navy built a series of protected cruisers, thirty-three vessels in total. Protected cruisers were differentiated from other cruising warships by their relatively light sloped armor deck that provided a measure of protection against incoming shellfire, as opposed to armored cruisers that relied on heavy belt armor, or unprotected cruisers that lacked armor entirely.^[1] They were designed to fulfill a variety of roles, including fleet scouts, colonial cruisers, and commerce raiders. Arguments over the purpose of the French fleet during this period played a major role in the design of these ships; proponents of the Jeune École doctrine favored large cruisers capable of attacking enemy merchant shipping while traditionalist officers preferred vessels more suited to fleet operations. A third group sought more cruisers to expand and defend the French colonial empire. The period was also marked by strategic confusion in the French naval command, as the country reoriented from its traditional rivalry with Great Britain to the perceived threat posed by the Italo-German alliance.^[2]

The first French protected cruiser, Sfax, was designed in the early 1880s in response to the introduction of similar vessels in the British Royal Navy; two more vessels of similar but larger designs—Tage and Amiral Cécille—followed shortly thereafter. By 1886, the pro-Jeune École Admiral Théophile Aube became the French Minister of Marine and initiated a large construction program that included the cruisers Davout, Suchet, and Alger, and the three-ship Forbin, Troude, and Jean Bart classes. The early 1890s saw the construction of the Friant and D'Assas classes, derivatives of the Davout design, and the Linois-class cruisers, which were improvements on the Troude and Forbin types. The colonial cruisers of the Descartes and Catinat classes were also built during this period.

Beginning in the mid-1890s, a series of large cruisers were ordered; the first of these, D'Entrecasteaux, carried the largest guns of any French cruiser, and was intended to serve as a flagship of the squadron stationed in French Indochina, while three more vessels, Guichen, Châteaurenault, and Jurien de la Gravière, were designed to serve as long-range commerce destroyers. Two final colonial cruisers of the D'Estrées class were also built during this period.

Most of the vessels had relatively uneventful careers, serving in a variety of locations with the main fleets, in the French colonies in Asia, and on patrol in the Atlantic. Two were lost in accidents, Jean Bart and Infernet, in 1907 and 1910, respectively. Many of the ships had either been broken up or reduced to secondary roles by the start of World War I in August 1914, but several saw action, including Jurien de la Gravière at the Battle of Antivari and a number of vessels along the coast of Ottoman Syria. One vessel, Châteaurenault, was lost during the war to a German U-boat attack in 1917. Most of the surviving protected cruisers were discarded in the post-war reduction of the French Navy, though a few lingered on in service as hulks into the 1920s or later. D'Entrecasteaux remained in service the longest, being loaned to the Belgian Navy in the mid-1920s and then sold to the Polish Navy in 1927; she was ultimately seized by German forces during the Invasion of Poland in 1939 and scrapped in 1942.