The Démocratie was a Liberté class

Liberté class battleship

The Liberté class was a class of pre-dreadnought battleships of the French Navy, an improvement of the République-class battleship of a similar design.-Design and History:...

  pre-dreadnought

Pre-dreadnought

Pre-dreadnought battleship is the general term for all of the types of sea-going battleships built between the mid-1890s and 1905. Pre-dreadnoughts replaced the ironclad warships of the 1870s and 1880s...

 battleship

Battleship

A battleship is a large armored warship with a main battery consisting of heavy caliber guns. Battleships were larger, better armed and armored than cruisers and destroyers. As the largest armed ships in a fleet, battleships were used to attain command of the sea and represented the apex of a...

 of the French Navy

French Navy

The French Navy, officially the Marine nationale and often called La Royale is the maritime arm of the French military. It includes a full range of fighting vessels, from patrol boats to a nuclear powered aircraft carrier and 10 nuclear-powered submarines, four of which are capable of launching...

. She served in the Mediterranean Sea

Mediterranean Sea

The Mediterranean Sea is a sea connected to the Atlantic Ocean surrounded by the Mediterranean region and almost completely enclosed by land: on the north by Anatolia and Europe, on the south by North Africa, and on the east by the Levant...

 during World War I

World War I

World War I , which was predominantly called the World War or the Great War from its occurrence until 1939, and the First World War or World War I thereafter, was a major war centred in Europe that began on 28 July 1914 and lasted until 11 November 1918...

, and was scrapped in 1922.

Design

Commissioned in 1908, Democratie had mostly the same characteristics as her sisterships. She displaced 14900 tonnes (14,664.6 LT), was 134 metres (439.6 ft) long, had a beam

Beam (nautical)

The beam of a ship is its width at the widest point. Generally speaking, the wider the beam of a ship , the more initial stability it has, at expense of reserve stability in the event of a capsize, where more energy is required to right the vessel from its inverted position...

 of 24.25 metres (79.6 ft) and a draft of 8.4 metres (27.6 ft). Equipped with three steam engines rated at 20500 ihp powered by twenty-two coal-fired boilers, Democratie could move at a maximum speed of 19.4 knots (10.6 m/s) and a range of 8000 nautical miles (9,206.3 mi) at 12 knots (6.5 m/s). She could carry 900 tonnes (885.8 LT) of coal

Coal

Coal is a combustible black or brownish-black sedimentary rock usually occurring in rock strata in layers or veins called coal beds or coal seams. The harder forms, such as anthracite coal, can be regarded as metamorphic rock because of later exposure to elevated temperature and pressure...

. Her main armament was four 305mm/40 Modèle 1893 gun

305mm/40 Modèle 1893 gun

The Canon de 305 mm Modèle 1893/96 was a heavy naval gun used as the main armament of a number of French pre-dreadnoughts during World War I. It equipped the Charlemagne, République and Liberté class battleships as well as the unique battleships Iéna and Suffren.-Description:The 12-inch/40 calibre...

s in two twin turrets, augmented by ten 194 millimetres (7.6 in) guns in five twin turrets, and five torpedo tubes. Her only difference was that she was the only ship of the class to have protective bulges fitted around each of the bow anchors.

Service history

After her series of peaceable cruises in the Mediterranean Sea was interrupted by World War I, Démocratie and the remainder of her class were based at Mudros in the Aegean Sea. With them were the remaining ships of the Danton class (the lead ship had been sunk by a U-boat in 1915). These ships were under the command of Admiral Michael Culme Seymour from early 1918 in order to provide defense to Allied troops around the Aegean. She also participated in the defense of the Otranto Barrage

Otranto Barrage

The Otranto Barrage was an Allied naval blockade of the Otranto Straits between Brindisi in Italy and Corfu on the Albanian side of the Adriatic Sea in World War I. The blockade was intended to prevent the Austro-Hungarian Navy from escaping into the Mediterranean and threatening Allied operations...

. Démocratie was decommissioned in 1921 and scrapped.