1870s and early 1880s dangerously vulnerable to damage above the waterline. These ships used shallow waterline belt armor to protect their sides, but most of their hulls were unprotected by armor altogether. Many navies began to incorporate thin side protection above the belt to deal with the threat. Further complicating matters were the developments of self-propelled torpedoes and small, fast torpedo boats that posed an existential threat to the battleship-dominated fleets of the European navies. Development and cancellation The fleet program of 1880 projected a total of six new ironclad battleships; the first four were to be the three Marceaus and Hoche. The remaining pair of vessels was due to begin construction in 1882. An initial plan by the naval engineer Louis de Bussy proposed a ship modeled on the British ironclad , carrying a main battery of four guns in a pair of gun turrets arranged en echelon amidships. Before work on the vessels began, the French naval command reconsidered and opted for an improved Marceau, and a new design was prepared by Charles Ernest Huin, who had designed the Marceaus and Hoche. The new design repeated the lozenge arrangement of the main battery in single mounts. The exact timeline for the design and construction of the ships are unclear. According to the historians John Jordan and Philip Caresse, Huin's design was approved in January 1885 and work on the two ships, Charles Martel and Brennus, began that year in Toulon and Lorient, respectively. They credit Admiral Théophile Aube, who became the French Minister of Marine in January 1886, as immediately suspending work on the new ships upon becoming the naval minister. Aube was a proponent of the (Young School), which held that cheap torpedo boats could effectively replace the capital ships that had been the primary component of naval power. But according to naval historian Theodore Ropp, the decision to cancel the vessels had been made in late 1884, during the tenure of Admiral Alexandre Peyron; while he was not a partisan of the , he was also not convinced that further battleship construction was warranted during a period of technological uncertainty. He remained committed to completing the Marceau class and Hoche, as they were already well advanced in construction, but was unwilling to authorize construction of any new vessels. This is corroborated by the 1887 edition of the contemporary journal The Naval Annual, which reported that the