submitted proposals to the competition; the design for Carnot was prepared by Victor Saglio, the Sous-directeur des constructions navales (Under-director of Naval Construction) at Toulon. The navy accepted Saglio's proposal and ordered the ship on 10 September 1891. Though the program called for four ships to be built in the first year, five were ultimately ordered: Carnot, , , , and . She and her half-sisters were disappointments in service; they generally suffered from stability problems, and Louis-Émile Bertin, the Director of Naval Construction in the late 1890s, referred to the ships as "chavirables" (prone to capsizing). 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 Carnot was long between perpendiculars, and had a beam of and a draft of . She had a displacement of . Her forecastle gave her a high freeboard forward, but her quarterdeck was cut down to the main deck level aft. Her hull was given a marked tumblehome to give the 27 cm guns wide fields of fire. The ship was equipped with a heavy military foremast and a lighter pole mainmast. Her bridge and other superstructure was smaller compared to Charles Martel to reduce topweight, and she was equipped with lighter pole masts instead of the heavy fighting masts used on her half-sister. She nevertheless suffered from the same stability problems that plagued Charles Martel and many other French capital ships of the period; attempts were made to reduce her topweight by cutting down the bridge and replacing her military mast with another pole mast, but these changes were not successful. In addition, Carnot was completed with a very large number of portholes in her hull, which were criticized for the reduction in the hull's watertight integrity they imposed. Later in the ship's career, many of the portholes were sealed to reduce the risk of flooding. Carnot had a crew of 647 officers and enlisted men. Carnot had two vertical, three-cylinder triple expansion engines manufactured by Schneider-Creusot; each