French Battleship Paris
Paris was the third ship of the Courbet-class battleships, the first dreadnoughts built for the French Navy. She was completed before World War I as part of the 1911 naval building programme. She spent the war in the Mediterranean, spending most of 1914 providing gunfire support for the Montenegrin Army until her sister ship Jean Bart was torpedoed by the submarine U-12 on 21 December. She spent the rest of the war providing cover for the Otranto Barrage that blockaded the Austro-Hungarian Navy in the Adriatic Sea.
Paris supported French and Spanish troops in 1925 during the Third Rif War before becoming a school ship in 1931. She was modernized in three separate refits between the wars even though she was not deemed to be a first-class battleship. She remained in that role until the Battle of France, which began on 10 May 1940, after which she was hastily rearmed. She supported Allied troops in the defence of Le Havre during June until she was damaged by a German bomb, but she took refuge later that month in England. As part of Operation Catapult, she was seized in Plymouth by British forces on 3 July. She was used as a depot and a barracks ship there by the Royal and Polish Navies for the rest of the war. Returned to the French in July 1945 she was towed to Brest the following month and used as a depot ship until she was stricken on 21 December 1955.
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—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
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