French Ship Justice – Justice was a pre-dreadnought battleship of the Liberté class built by the…

French Ship Justice – Justice was a pre-dreadnought battleship of the Liberté class built by the French Navy. She had three sister ships: Liberté, Vérité, and Démocratie. Justice was laid down in April 1903, launched in October 1904, and completed in February 1908, over a year after the revolutionary British battleship HMS Dreadnought made ships like Justice obsolete. She was armed with a main battery of four 305 mm (12.0 in) guns, compared to the ten guns of the same caliber mounted on Dreadnought.

After her commissioning, Justice was assigned to the Mediterranean Fleet. In September 1909, she traveled to the United States for the Hudson-Fulton Celebration. At the outbreak of World War I in August 1914, she was assigned to the 2nd Division of the 2nd Squadron of the Mediterranean Fleet. She covered troop convoys from North Africa to France in the first days of the war, and spent the rest based at Corfu and Mudros without seeing any action. After the war ended, she participated in the Allied intervention in the Russian Civil War, though a mutiny in the French fleet in April 1919 led to the fleet’s withdrawal. Justice was sold for scrapping in 1922.

View full size (1600×1093)