This meant that increasing firepower became a case of mounting more guns, but this has a drawback too. The actual guns of a battleship are often the most expensive part of them, developing, building and testing a new gun is bloody expensive and the French didn't have the money to develop a new gun so chose to stick with the 13.4 inch rifles of the Provence class. Yet again the French were behind the curve, the Royal Navy was already building 15 inch gunned ships by the time the first Provence was launched and the Germans were rumored to be building larger guns for their next ships as well. Still the French were innovators and adapted quickly, their first Dreadnought type ships the Courbet's showed a good touch, well armoured and well armed and the second class the Provence class were a logical development featuring a powerful 13.4 inch gun in the now standard two turrets fore, aft and one amidships. Shaking off the ideas of the Jeune Ecole took until the early 1900's and the French were lagging behind the rest of the world, they were building 5 Pre-Dreadnought battleships whilst the major powers of Europe were already building Dreadnoughts which put the French ships to shame. The cruisers were more successful in most cases but were some of the most ugly warships afloat whilst some of them were so overloaded and badly designed that they could not risk leaving port in rough weather. One ship the Marceau took over 10 years to complete and upon launching she was already long outclassed by rivals overseas. The ships they designed in most cases took so long to build that they were utterly obsolete by the time they were launched. The result was nothing short of disasterious for French battleship design and construction. *The Dupuy de Lome, the worlds first armoured cruiser including her armour layout.
Battleships would be joined by well armed but poorly protected coast defence ships whilst torpedo boats and cruisers would be the focus of French naval building. Instead the Young School urged that France recognise it could not outbuild the British in terms of Battleship numbers and instead build masses of small craft with the new Locomotive Torpedo to swarm larger vessels as well as large, fast cruisers for long range commerce raiding, targeting England's commercial lifeline.
The theory of the Jeune Ecole or 'Young School' was a radical shift from previous naval policy which espoused the construction of battleships to face their main opponent Great Britain. They built the first Ironclad, steam driven warship, they pioneered submarine development as well as making the first superfiring mounted guns to see service on a Warship yet in the late 1800's French naval policy went down the utterly wrong route. The Marine Nationale always innovated when it came to technology and trying something new.
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