she was the only one still in active service at the outbreak of World War I. She also provided the basis for the next class of French battleships, the three s built in the mid-1890s. She and her half-sisters nevertheless were disappointments in service; Bouvet suffered from stability problems that ultimately contributed to her loss in 1915, and all five of the vessels compared poorly to their British counterparts, particularly their contemporaries of the . The ships suffered from a lack of uniformity of equipment, which made them hard to maintain in service, and their mixed gun batteries comprising several calibers made gunnery in combat conditions difficult, since shell splashes were hard to differentiate. Many of the problems that plagued the ships in service were a result of the limitation on their displacement, particularly their stability and seakeeping. General characteristics and machinery Bouvet was long between perpendiculars, long at the waterline, and long overall. She had a beam of and an average draft of . She had a displacement of as designed. Unlike her half-sisters, which had a cut down quarterdeck, Bouvet retained a full flush deck. Her superstructure was reduced in size compared to her half-sisters, and she had a pair of short military masts; these changes were made to reduce the top-heaviness experienced with the earlier vessels. She kept the pronounced tumblehome to give the 27 cm guns wide fields of fire. Bouvet had a standard crew of 31 officers and 591 enlisted men, though as a flagship her crew grew to 41 officers and 651 enlisted men. She had three vertical triple-expansion steam engines each driving a single three-bladed screw; the outboard screws were wide, while the center shaft was slightly smaller, at in diameter. The engines were powered with steam supplied by thirty-two Belleville water-tube boilers that were license-built by Indret. The boilers were divided into four boiler rooms, which were placed in two pairs on either end of the magazines for the wing turrets, and divided by a central bulkhead. The boilers were ducted into a pair of funnels. Her three engines were placed side by side and also divided by longitudinal bulkheads. Her propulsion system was rated at , which allowed the ship to steam at a maximum speed of on speed trials with a light loading, though while on a 24-hour test using normal displacement, she cruised at . Using forced draft, she