Bouvet was a pre-dreadnought battleship of the French Navy that was built in the s. Bouvet was the last vessel of the group to be built, and her design was based on that of Charles Martel. Like her half-sisters, she was armed with a main battery of two mm 12 in guns and two mm Bouvet proved to be the most successful design of the five, and she was used as the basis for the subsequent Charlemagne class.
Nevertheless, she suffered from design flaws that reduced her stability and contributed to her loss in Bouvet spent the majority of her peacetime career in the Mediterranean Squadron conducting routine training exercises. This period was relatively uneventful, though she was involved in a collision with the battleship Gaulois in that saw both ships' captains relieved of command.
In , she assisted in the response to the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in Italy. Bouvet was withdrawn from front-line service in and thereafter used as part of the training fleet.
The ship was the only vessel of her group of five half-sisters still in service at the outbreak of World War I in July A significant portion of the French Army was stationed in French North Africa , so at the start of the war, Bouvet and much of the rest of the fleet were used to escort troop convoys across to southern France. With this work done by late August, Bouvet and several other battleships were used to patrol for contraband shipments in the central Mediterranean.
From November to late December, she was stationed as a guard ship at the northern entrance to the Suez Canal. The ship thereafter joined the naval operations off the Dardanelles , where she participated in a series of attacks on the Ottoman fortifications guarding the straits.
