The Liberté was a 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...

, and the lead ship of her 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:...

. Commanded by capitaine de vaisseau Louis Jaurès

Louis Jaurès

Marie Paul Louis Jaurès was a French admiral and deputy. He was the brother of Jean Jaurès.-Biography:Jaurès was born at Castres, Tarn....

, She sailed to the United States after her commissioning. Her career was ended when,on 25 September 1911, as the Liberté was moored in Toulon

Toulon

Toulon is a town in southern France and a large military harbor on the Mediterranean coast, with a major French naval base. Located in the Provence-Alpes-Côte-d'Azur region, Toulon is the capital of the Var department in the former province of Provence....

 harbour, an accidental explosion in the starboard bow started a fire in the 194mm magazines, which quickly spread to the rest of the ship, in spite of the efforts of the crew and attempts at flooding the magazines. At 5:53 pm, the main magazines detonated, destroying the ship and killing 200 of her crew. People on the neighbouring ships and in the port were also killed and maimed, yielding a total count of around 300 killed. On 25 February 1925, the wreck was raised, and subsequently scrapped.

Design

Commissioned in 1908, Liberte had mostly the same characteristics as her sister ships. 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, Liberte 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.

Service history

After commissioning, the Liberté left to America for a short cruise. Two years later, on 25 September 1911, as the Liberté was moored in Toulon

Toulon

Toulon is a town in southern France and a large military harbor on the Mediterranean coast, with a major French naval base. Located in the Provence-Alpes-Côte-d'Azur region, Toulon is the capital of the Var department in the former province of Provence....

 harbour, an accidental explosion in the starboard bow started a fire in the 194mm magazines, which quickly spread to the rest of the ship, in spite of the efforts of the crew and attempts at flooding the magazines. At 5:53 pm, the main magazines detonated, destroying the ship and killing 200 of her crew. People on the neighbouring ships and in the port were also killed and maimed, yielding a total count of around 300 killed.

The loss hit the French opinion particularly harshly because of the high human toll, of the large military value of the Liberté, and because it was the latest of a long series of accidental fires due to chemical instability of the ammunition, leading to the "affaire des poudres" ("gunpowder scandal"). The French Navy suffered a number of fatal accidents in the Harbour of Toulon, starting in February 1907 when nine men were killed in a torpedo boat explosion, followed by the explosion of the Iéna

French battleship Iéna (1898)

Iéna was a pre-dreadnought battleship of the French Navy. The ship's keel was laid in 1898 and she was completed four years later. Her design was derived from the preceding s with a heavier secondary battery and thicker armour. She retained the tumblehome characteristic of all large French warships...

in March 1907 killing 107 men, a gun explosion in August 1908 which killed six, an explosion on a cruiser taking 13, and the death of six on the cruiser Gloire on 10 September 1911.

The wreck was raised on 25 February 1925 and scrapped.