The Cruel Sea:
French Light Cruisers, Part One
by Mike Bennighof, Ph.D.
August 2022

Despite having built up a fairly large fleet of battleships – both late-model pre-dreadnoughts and early dreadnoughts – France failed to provide the scouting forces to accompany the big new ships. Armored cruisers had been intended for the role, but eventually it became clear that these ships lacked the speed to adequately scout in the new environment of naval surface warfare.

The 1912 Naval Law would change that. By 1920, the Marine Nationale would have a fleet of 28 battleships, 10 scout cruisers and 52 destroyers. That’s less impressive than it looks, as the totals included the 11 most recent pre-dreadnought battleships and the four dreadnoughts of the Courbet class already laid down. But it did guarantee that the French naval buildup would continue – unless, of course, a world war broke out at some point in the near future.

The new scout cruiser would break with the previous French pattern, and give the fleet something closer to the ships Britain and Germany had already been building for some years. The first proposals foresaw a 6,000-ton ship, which would have been considerably larger than the German Magdeburg class (4,500 tons) and British Town class (4,800 tons) then completing or under construction. The Service Technique des Constructions Navale (SCTN), in charge of the design, opted for a ship of similar size and capabilities.

The new ship, designated the La Motte-Picquet class (with the lead ship named for Toussaint-Guillaume La Motte-Picquet, a naval hero of the Seven Years’ and American Wars), would displace 4,500 tons, make 29 knots at top speed and carry a main armament of eight 138.6mm (5.46-inch) guns and four torpedo tubes. That put it squarely in the realm of conventional practice, which by itself made the ship unusual among French designs.

Launching La Motte-Picquet.

If anything, the new cruiser was already somewhat dated when the round rounds of plans were drafted: she had a straight stem, rather than the flared “clipper” bow of the latest British and German cruisers. Her armament was laid out much like older cruisers as well, with two single mounts on the centerline fore and aft, shielded and super-firing (one mounted above and behind the other), with the other four in the waist. Apparently, the ship was sketched in two variants, one with the waist-mounted guns in shielded mounts just like those along the centerline, and the other with them in an old-still casemate (that is, within an armored structure).

The 138mm Model 1910 was the same weapon mounted on the French Courbet- and Bretagne-class dreadnoughts, and would have armed the following Normandie- and Lyon-class as well. Its range, shell-weight and armor penetration were all considerably less than the Britsh 6-inch Mark XI that armed their more recent light cruisers. It fired a heavier shell than the German 10.5cm SK L/45 of German light cruisers, but it was considerably out-ranged by the lighter German weapon (as was the British 6-inch gun). She carried her 450mm torpedoes in four hull-mounted tubes above the waterline, two on either side.

La Motte-Picquet had next to no armor – a thin belt of just over one inch thickness with a bulkhead of about half that closing off either end; the deck had a similar armored covering. In the casemate version the belt extended up to cover the battery as well; in the version with shielded guns, it ended at the main deck. The gun shields were flimsier still, not even giving much protection against splinters or small-arms fire.

The French ship did have an edge in speed over her British and German contemporaries, 29 knots compared to 25 knots for the British cruiser and 27 knots for the German ship. She would make this speed with turbines, which the French had been using in large ships since their last class of pre-dreadnoughts, but they would be powered by more conservative mixed-firing boilers burning both oil and coal like British and German ships, though the British were already hoping to move on to purely oil-fired ships.

The Marine Nationale planned to lay down five ships in late 1914: three of them at the Toulon Naval Dockyard in November and two more at private shipyards immediately after. The second group of five would presumably follow on the same slipways as soon as the first ships had been launched. But all work on new warships halted in August 1914 with the outbreak of the First World War, as workers were drafted and priorities shifted to the Army’s needs. The 138mm guns, already under construction, would be diverted to the Army where they were mounted on carriages built for them by Schneider or Saint-Chamond.

A 138mm Model 1910 naval cannon, re-bored to 145mm, on a Saint-Chamond field carriage.

The project would be revived in 1915, somewhat modified and enlarged with a pair of 65mm anti-aircraft guns added. But with the French economy under even more stress as the war went poorly, there was no hope of beginning naval construction again and the project was set aside once more. Another revival in 1917 – like all the design bureaus of the warring powers, the SCTN had to generate paper projects to keep its young naval architects out of the trenches – moved the eight 138mm guns into four twin, powered turrets and replaced the four hull-mounted torpedo tubes with a dozen tubes for the much more potent 550mm torpedo, in four triple deck mounts. It’s not clear whether this ship would have retained her mixed-firing power plant or shifted to oil fuel only.

Navy Minister Georges Leygues asked for six of this cruiser, labelled Projet 171, in the 1920 Naval Program as a replacement for the cancelled battleships left over from before the Great War. Before they were approved, the French learned that new British and American cruisers would be armed with 6-inch guns exclusively and make much higher speeds, as Projet 171 retained the 29 knots of La Motte-Picquet. A new design would be needed, with greater speed and armament but retaining the general outline of Projet 171; the tale of the resulting Duguay-Trouin class is a whole different story.

In our alternative-history world of the Second Great War, both the original La Motte-Picquet design and Projet 171 exist. Four of the ten La Motte-Picquet-class cruisers appear in the massive expansion set Second Great War at Sea: The Cruel Sea as the Tancrede class; the Marine Nationale re-used the name La Motte-Picquet for a Duguay-Trouin-class cruiser so we had to improvise with a new name.

In the world of the Second Great War, they were laid down before the outbreak of war and completed afterwards, as France did not receive the German and Austrian cruisers she took as reparations in our own reality. All ten ships underwent reconstruction in the early 1930’s, with their eight 138mm guns replaced by five of the more potent 155mm weapons and their mixed-firing boilers replaced by purely oil-fueled machinery. They can no longer make 29 knots, but are a match for the similar British and German cruisers still in service in their respective fleets.

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Mike Bennighof is president of Avalanche Press and holds a doctorate in history from Emory University. A Fulbright Scholar and NASA Journalist in Space finalist, he has published a great many books, games and articles on historical subjects; people are saying that some of them are actually good. He lives in Birmingham, Alabama with his wife and three children. He will never forget his Iron Dog, Leopold.

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