Some Examples of Tumble-Home |
While tumble-home was not too serious a drawback in the smaller ships of the 1860s and 1870s, it was carried to a grotesque extreme in the battleships of the Belle Epoque (c. 1890-1912). The result was that all the principal warships of the Maritime Nationale had serious stability problems which affected every aspect of their operation. Imagine attempting to coordinate fleet movements or fight a naval battle from the bridge of a ship that tosses like a cork in even moderate seas, with a crew of seasick (or at least badly tossed-about) sailors. It is just as well France's wars between 1871 and 1914 were colonial wars (encouraged by Germany as a diversion from building up France's continental strength). Below, cross section of the battleship Masséna dramatically demonstrates the strange shape aspired to as the beau idéale of the Marine Nationale as the 19th century wound down and the 20th dawned.
The principle of tumble-home hulls was only abandoned well after the turn of the century, being incorporated in less extreme form even in the Republique class of 1903-04 which finally gave France a competitive pre-dreadnought design -- 2 years before the advent of the Dreadnought made all such designs obsolete!
What is it about French engineering? It seems France and the former Yugoslavia were the only countries whose cars could make Detroit's product look good! Kooky idées fixes seem to hamstring French industrial production at every phase. After a promising early lead in development of reliable breech-loading guns, French gun designers went in their own direction for some decades, developing long-barreled, high-muzzle-velocity weapons firing lightweight shells, using nitrocellulose gel propellant. By the time the French had caught up to the 1890s standard of warship set by Britain, around 1904, Germany was outbuilding them to field the largest, most modern fleet after the Royal Navy. Britain and France were soon consulting on how to jointly face down the threat of Germany, France's hereditary enemy.
Nevertheless, only 15 years earlier, the British Admiralty had considered France Enemy #1. It is quite delicious to look over the warships on which this belief was based, many with advanced features which were widely copied, including by the British. And it is beyond amusing to trace the adulation of French naval ideas by the incompetent Romanovs in Russia. Dubious ship design, half-baked yard work, ridiculous redesign by the ships' own officers to add personal luxuries to their quarters, plus incompetent leadership and green crews led to the annihilation of the Tsarist Navy at the Battle of Tsushima in 1905, even though the Empire had spent extravagantly to expand its fleet in the lead-in to this historic debacle. | 
Grotesque contours of an 1890s French battleship reflect
France's national obsession with tumble-home. The thin upperworks and bulging flanks allowed siting of turrets on the ship's beam, in the commonly used "diamond pattern."
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The British adopted a more moderate approach to tumble-home, clearly visible in this Majestic class battleship -- a contemporary of the French vessel above.
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The Russian navy eagerly embraced French design doctrine, seen here in the French-built Tsesarevich.
The 5-ship Borodino class copied this ship with many ill-conceived modifications, making an already bad design markedly worse.
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French design had its advocates even in the U.S.
Here is the USS Brooklyn, an 1890s armored cruiser laid out just like a French battleship.
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Regardless of their seakeeping qualities, these ships carried powerful modern guns in state-of-the-art mountings and were most impressive to see. It was the foremost age of empire and European militarism, and the fleet evoked great patriotic adulation in France. So French warships were favorite subjects of shutterbugs from the Riviera to the Île de France -- even to far Algeria and Indochine. So settle back and enjoy our photo history of the Marine Nationale; revel in our extensive links to related topics, critical personalities, and emerging technologies. It's all part of the French Navy experience at Big, Bad Battleships.com.
Vive la France!
A Few Pictures to Arouse Your Interest Liberty Leading the People was painted by Eugène Delacroix to commemorate the spirit of the 1830 revolution that finally banished the Bourbon monarchy from France. Like no other, this painting expresses French revolutionary élan.
Battleship Gaulois of the Charlemagne class (1899), sunk by a U-boat in WWI. Schematic
Armored Cruiser LeBruix of the Amiral Charner class (1891). These ships featured ineptly designed watertight subdivision, mainly relying on a longitudinal bulkhead along the hull's axis. This characteristic led them to capsize easily when holed at the turn of the bilge (a characteristic shared by British pre-dreadnought warships). The lead ship Amiral Charner was torpedoed by the U-21 while patrolling off Beirut in Feb. 1916, going down in 4 minutes with her entire crew, save for one lone survivor.
 Embodying the insoluble contradictions of 1890s French naval design and the parallel contraditions of turn-of-the-century French politics, the medieval mass of the château at Brest dwarfs the long, arrow-like hull of the 1898 cruiser Guichen. Another of the jeune école monstrosities, Guichen mounted only two 6" guns on a 437-foot hull. The 23-knot protected cruiser was intended as a commerce raider, in keeping with jeune école doctrine. Like the preceding generation of cruisers (above), this swift raider featured a very narrow beam, tumble-home sides, and a high, narrow midsection, ensuring a wallowing, stomach-churning ride for her crew and dizzying difficulties for her gunlayers. Seven years in the making, she was obsolete by the time she first hoisted her commission pennant, but made a magnificent spectacle of spray and smoke for the postcard photographers. Schematic · At-sea photo
Vive la France! Vive le Joîe-de-Vivre!
Vive la Marine Nationale Française!
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Some statistics: in France's penultimate bid to recapture the initiative during the 1890s, France built 9 first-class battleships. But in the same period, Britain built 34. Moreover, the French ships were smaller (2/3 the size of comparable British classes) and mounted fewer big guns. France was also hampered by its insistence on its own peculiar hull design, based on the sailing-ship era property of tumble-home (in which the ship's sides curve inwards, and then upwards to near vertical, as they climb upwards from the waterline). This hull form provided bulging flanks, enabling the development of France's favored gunnery disposition, the so-called "diamond pattern" (left) with the beam guns shooting ahead (or astern) through the massive concave space cut out of a more conventional hull form. The typical French hull form made for a very narrow, tall superstructure, making the ships top-heavy. It also led to small ships barely able to support the weight of twin turrets; hence the preference for single-gun mountings -- a preference which persisted past 1900.
