Oh yeah, tangentially to this, I recently learned that just before World War I, the French Navy planned and ordered a class of five super-dreadnought battleships, the Normandie class. Construction was begun on all five of them, but none had been completed by the outbreak of the war, at which point changed national priorities meant that they never would be. The guns earmarked for the ships were sent to the French Army instead, and the four hulls that were finished enough to float were launched to clear the slipways so they could be used to build more urgently needed vessels of other types.

After the war, the Normandie-class ships would have been obsolete before they could even be completed, so after a lot of wrangling about what to do with them, the four launched hulls were scrapped in the 1920s. The fifth ship, Béarn, which hadn't been far enough along to launch during the war, was eventually completed as the French Navy's first aircraft carrier and served into the 1960s.

I mention this because dreadnought-era French battleships were all named after traditional provinces of ancien régime France, in much the same way that Japanese battleships of the same era were named after historical provinces of Japan, e.g., Nagato. Had they been completed, the second Normandie-class ship would have been named Flandre after the ancient County of Flanders.

So there almost was a French battleship named Flandre. In fact, the French Navy did have an earlier ironclad frigate by that name, which was launched in 1864 and scrapped in 1887.

--G.
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
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